Artist statement: “I’m done playing games, I’m taking a nap”

This illustration was designed to accompany an article about how video games will affect teens and their addiction to these games. The main idea I was trying to show in my illustration is that one will not succeed in life unless they go out and achieve realistic healthy goals; these teens that get sucked into the online world have a very hard time striving in the real world.

The tone of the article is very realistic and relateable in the sense that this addiction is very common in almost everybody’s life: addictions can occur in many different ways, including addiction to video games. The results can get very serious if not dealt with right away, many of those teenagers start to develop social anxiety, depression, the feeling of loneliness and those are extremely unhealthy for anybody especially teenagers because of the fact that at this stage they are supposed to start being more self-dependent, financially and responsibly. These teens have a very hard time getting out of this addiction, not everyone has a strong sense of self control and that makes it hard for the teens to get up and make a change in their lives.

It took me a couple rough drafts and sketches to get the final good copy sketch. Different ideas such as placement, camera angles and whether or not to add text into the picture, were coming in and out of my thought process. After getting back the first set of edits about my picture, I decided to change up the position to a more eye level perspective and as if the viewer were standing at the back of the room observing. This helped to give a bit more of an inviting look and made it feel like you were in the room rather than just looking at a room. Colour choice is key when trying to send a message to the audience that certain things are more important than others; colour also gives the image a tone in a way that the audience will feel a certain emotion when looking upon the illustration. So I then changed the colour of some of the objects like the game controller to make it look more important and changed the shade of the TV to make it look more realistic. I had lots of feedback and took out many unnecessary details like cutting out some excess lines and objects like a clock that had no meaning and may have come off as distracting and had no importance to the message I was trying to portray. After doing those edits I uploaded the image to the computer.

Trying to figure out GIMP (the image editing program I use) is very confusing and difficult, nothing will come out looking perfect and the lines won’t look the straightest. I had never used or even heard of this program before; having to watch video tutorials and read about how the tools work and what they are for I was able to use the basic tools to cleanup and give life to the image. The program isn’t very straight forward, for the longest time I couldn’t even get colour to show and it took me almost two full classes to figure it out.

The theme of my illustration is both positive and/or negative depending on how you perceive things, it shows that addictions usually don’t have a huge benefit to your health and future whereas the character walking out the door is going into the outside world to work and earn money so that they can have a healthy long life. The focus of the image would be the two characters, one walking and one sitting with icons symbolizing money beside them. The money is supposed to look similar to a video game would and also symbolize that one will drain you of money, life, experience and health and the other will strive in life with a healthy and positive outlook on life.

Looking back on my finished image I can see many areas in which I could have approved on such as the fine print details that would have taken the image to a more interactive level. For example I could have positioned the characters closer together to avoid the look of wasted space and it would have made it look more like the addiction isn’t permanent and that there are opportunities all around the teen. I could have made it so that the one boy playing video games is a bit more obvious by making the controller, console and the game itself bolder and colourful. There also is no shading or contrast which could have helped give more life to the picture and more emphasis on the emotion this is tied to a certain object like the TV or the briefcase of money.