Let the Blogging Re-begin

Are all of you prepared for Becky's late night blogathon? Well, you better be! It's absurdly late, but here nonetheless. And so, I will begin these posts with a tale from way back when we did a little thing known as (drum roll) project one:

For the tunnel of oppression project, I decided to focus on gender after scrapping my first poster which was all about religion. Since I've been burned by religion in the past (also, I'm atheist), my original poster was guilty of using stereotypes and I was worried that without my accompanying explanation, it would just come across as,well, mean. I actually think that the image looks really cool (there is fire, so obviously it's cool), and for my first illustrator venture, I'm pretty proud. But especially after visiting the tunnel, I was hesitant to point a finger at one group of people unfairly.

Sooo, we get the one to the left instead. I always found it

weird that the very items that mark us

as human mammals are edited out and portrayed as "gross" on magazines. For instance: pores, hair, wrinkles, shine marks on skin, and a recent trend-- knee caps. Seriously. Oh yes, now these legs are unachievable and therefore attractive. I can follow the logic of photoshopping out zits, scars, and third eyes or whatever because they're viewed as unhealthy, but the alteration of things which are perfectly fine is sick. I'm okay with the fact that companies offer up beauty products, but the way they often market them is destructive. They need to redo their marketing which targets women and causes all sorts of messed up views on what's attractive.

Things I learned from this project: Illustrator is hard to use. Label objects that could be misconstrued (the bottle in my poster is clearly a foundation/make-up bottle to myself, but some people read it as peach-goo milk???). Determine whether or not your project could be misconstrued completely (see unused poster) before you actually draw the entire thing.