research for artwork project on child abuse/child labour

In design class, we have an assignment that we have to complete by the end of the semester, and this assignment takes up 60% of our coursework. For the assignment, we are to design something that is in accordance with the theme that our teacher gives us. And this semester, our theme is Child Abuse.

When I googled Child Abuse, a lot of stuff came up. But these were the keywords that really stood out for me:

damaged, lack of trust, worthless, anxiety, depression, anger.

These are the words that have been used to describe the feelings that children who have been abused go through. I felt so sick reading all the articles that were posted up online, especially about all the abuses that were carried out intentionally. The thing about child abuse is that the main abuser is usually someone that the child is familiar with, like a parent, sibling or a guardian. Amongst the types of abuses that I read about (including emotional abuse, physical abuse), sexual abuse and child neglect really caught my eye. The reason was because these 2 abuses are the kind that you cannot really recognize. Apart from showing odd behaviour, a normal person wouldn't be able to tell that the kid has been abused/is being abused. 

I think I already have some ideas as to how to depict all these into a picture. 

iron man colouring

Today we were taught how to colour within the lines of a blank drawing. An Iron Man drawing was selected from Google Images, and by using the Magic Wand we selected the portions of the drawing we would like to colour, and we would just fill the colour in with the brushes. It was relatively simple yet really fun to do.

It was more fun when I started shading Iron Man. I think I must've used about 70 layers and maybe 6-7 different shades of colours to do it. Took me quite a while but I was glad I managed it :) Then I saved it as a JPEG file, opened it up at Photoshop again, deleted the background and transferred the image onto a new fire background (which I also found on Google Images).

Colouring has never been this fun, hahaha :D

abstract art

 

After we were taught how to use the brushes and some of the basic tools in Photoshop, we were asked to design an abstract form of art. What I designed was the first thing that popped into my head at the moment- spaghetti! I'm not sure how abstract my art piece looks; nevertheless, I shall attempt to explain it. The strings of orange are the spaghetti noodles, the brownish circles represent meatballs, the light & dark green patches are the herbs that we generally throw in when eating spaghetti, and I thought the leaves would give the picture a more wholesome representation. The leaves also represent the herbs and parsley leaves that we find on our plates of pasta sometimes!

step #1

So we were asked to create & design a blog for our Intro to Design class.
I honestly can't wait to see what we get to learn next, as I'm not as efficient with Photoshop as I hope to be! :)