Category: Graphic Design

Title:  Please, Save Our Home!

Age Division:  6-8

Student: Jaylynne H

    I originally started thinking about social, racial, and environmental problems I wished to address. I used these ideas to drive a mixed media project earlier this year. That project was a tryptic. One image showed the problem with ocean pollution and how it kills many sea creatures. I thought that I could incorporate that idea and expand on it to make another piece showing what ocean pollution does.

The program I used was Piconkey.   I started off with a light blue background. I chose paper textures that referenced watercolor paper and added some color variety. I chose my background colors because they reminded me of the ocean. On my second layer I edited pictures of leaves that I thought resembled seaweed on the bottom of the ocean floor. The seaweed draws your eye upward and brings attention to the sea creatures

On the third layer,  my layer with the sea animals, I decided to make their colors bright. I also layered them on top of the leaves to make them look like they were tangled into them. For the trash that they are tangled in I made the colors contrast so that they weren’t blending together but standing out so that you could see what the trash was doing. I put ropes on the seahorses' body to show that if you throw things in the water carelessly then you could be killing animals. The same thing follows for the crab and starfish.

Lastly, I added my title and flourish on a fourth layer. I chose my title because so many people don’t realize how much of a problem ocean pollution is. How would you feel if your parents kept on throwing random things into your room just because they didn’t feel like putting it where it’s supposed to go? My assumption is that you wouldn’t be very happy about it and sooner or later you would get sick of it. That’s how the animals feel, we’re killing them, and we need to save them instead.