Monday, September 27, 2010

The Beginning!

Hello, Future Readers!

This is my very first blog!  So, please pardon my slow way of getting this started.  My intention for this is to have a place to post the latest projects I've been working on and to really push myself to document more of my work so that other people can see what I've been up to.  Simply because I'm an art student (see About Me section), most - if not pretty much all - of the work I post on this blog will be homework assignments.  So, to start this blog off, I'm going to post some of my recent work:

Starting with an assignment from last semester -
These three illustrations were for the class Narrative Illustration and the assignment was to illustrate a Edgar Allen Poe story, I was given "The Black Cat."  I'm pretty pleased with the way these illustrations came out.  And yes, the cat in the second picture is huge - but I'm okay with that.



Now I'd like to share something very recent.  As in so recent that it was due this morning -
This was for Concepts I.  We were given a Time Magazine article about the rising tension towards Muslims in America and then told to illustrate a cover around the question, "Is America Islamophobic?"  After reading the article, I could not stop thinking about how strange it is that big players in politics and the media seemed to have no trouble showing their prejudiced and misunderstanding feelings toward Muslims (especially in regards to the Park51 community center).  Also, the article mentioned ads for a "safe" way to leave Islam (I looked up these ads, they're real and they're appalling).  So, with such blatant prejudice in the face of a whole religion, I couldn't help noticing what seems to be similarities between what's going on here in America and how subtly the anti-Semitism started in pre-WWII Germany.  I know this is a very sensitive topic and I'm not suggesting that we'll have a holocaust of Muslims (my cover isn't refering to the Holocaust as a whole, just the feelings toward the Jews before it started), but the similarities between the attitudes toward the Muslims in America now and the Jews in Germany then feel very ominious to me.  This is a topic that I feel very strongly about and I know that my idea for a cover is probably too controversial to ever be published, I felt the need to stick to this concept anyway.  (This is also one of the very few pieces I've done that was mostly digital.)

Well, that's all I have time to post for now.   I'll post some of the other things I'm currently working on sometime within the next few days.  Until then, I hope everyone is enjoying their last week in September!

Shalom,
Grace

3 comments:

  1. YAYYYY you have a blog! And haha, your title is simply awesome!

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  2. Though I enjoy this blog post, I do think it is a bit strong. Maybe it is just because I am at a liberal college with many Muslims, but I don't really see racism here. You mentioned other articles you read. Could you send them to me? (Being a college kid in no religious, political science, etc classes, I do tend to get out of the loop).

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  3. This is the link for the article that our teacher gave us:
    http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2011798,00.html

    From the article, I looked up the Freedom Defense Initiative (http://freedomdefense.typepad.com/) and saw an ad from the website RefugeFromIslam.com, which I then went to.

    I realize this is kind of dark for a first blog post. I would have posted more illustrations, but I had to go to class. My next post will be happier. :)

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