Personal Idea: Different ways to achieve success

I want to focus on the idea of success and how many different ways that there are to be successful. Everyone has something different that they are good at, so everyone obviously can't achieve success in the same thing. For the photo itself, I want to utilize color (probably paints) and have hands painted in different colors to show the different paths that could lead to success. The hands are going to be reaching towards something (success) to show that it is possible to be successful in your own way.

Words and Text Final

I really do love the way this project turned out. It is almost exactly what I pictured when I came up with the idea.

Some of the elements were actually pretty difficult to accomplish. Pasting the silhouette of the figure onto the poster board was a struggle because I had to be really precise to save enough room for everything on the board. Cutting out the words took a couple of days because I had so many and I wanted them to be so close to the same size. Organizing the cut out words onto the piece wasn't super difficult, I just had to be careful to make sure that each one was readable and that there weren't any colors right next to each other.

The meaning behind the overall project is simply a person overcoming bullying through the use of compliments and thinking better of themselves. A person is depicted standing triumphantly on top of a pile of degrading words and is comprised of the compliments and "good" words to show that they are protected by them.

The degrading words were made black to show that they are dark and were made with a font that is kind of rough and ruined to indicate that they don't matter to that person anymore. The compliment words are colorful to show their positivity and how they can bring happiness to any person. They were made using a curvy font for a welcoming and positive vibe. Some of the words are larger than the others and they were chosen because they are the words that could have a larger impact on a person. The larger "bad" words are the ones that could really hurt someone's self esteem the most and could be very detrimental if you were to say them to someone. The larger "good" words are the ones that could really make someone feel good about themselves. I really wanted to focus on the text since that was a requirement for this project.

I hope to do more projects with collaging in the future because I really like to work with my hands.

Power: Words and Text

Idea: Collage words to create a person standing on top of a pile of debris in a victorious pose

• Compliments/words that are uplifting make up the person

• Put-downs, insults and degrading comments make up the pile of debris

Ways to obtain the words:

• Magazines- probably too difficult and time consuming

• Online (social media)

• Make them up

I decided to use a combination of social media, other places on the internet and the minds of myself and friends in class.

Statistic and Research:

• 939 active hate groups in the US

• Hate speech: direct and serious attacks on any protected category of people

• 3.2 million students are victims of bullying each year.

• Verbal harassment is the most common form of bullying. 

• According to a study conducted in 2005, one out of ten internet users aged between 10 and 17 are victims of bullying.

• 160,000 children skip school each day just to avoid verbal abuse from bullies. 

• Amongst children, verbal assault is mainly based on the facial appearance and behavior of the victim and not religious backgrounds or racial identity.

• Verbal abuse tends to be secretive.

• 83% of bullying incidents receive no intervention and continue to happen

Sources: nobullying.com, www.hiddenhurt.co.uk, simpleacts.org

http://www.silive.com/opinion/letters/index.ssf/2009/04/verbal_bullying_can_be_just_as.html

I found a lot of articles such as this one that talk about verbal abuse which is the main theme of my project. Verbal abuse is a very traumatic thing to experience and I feel like sometimes we overlook it which can cause serious reverberations in the victim's life. It can turn a very happy person into someone who doesn't feel confident in who they are and contemplates taking their life. 

I chose this theme for my project because I believe that verbal abuse is a serious problem in society today. Using the words that are seen in verbal abuse situations make it more of a reality for me and I hope the audience will see it in the same light.

Some people don't realize that just giving simple compliments (pretty, nice, funny, etc.) instead of put downs (ugly, mean, crazy, etc.) can really influence the way a person feels and I tired to emphasize that in my project.

I was originally going to just try to create the person straight from the words but I didn't think that it would work very well because I would have to be precise. So instead I decided to take a silhouette shot and just paste my words over top of it. It will make the project look more realistic.

This is my contact sheet for the silhouette shots. It took me awhile to get the set up right so that her entire body would be in the shot so that her body would be easy to edit and cut out. 

I found an artist named Jamie Poole who uses poetry to create portraits. hee takes the words from the poems and forms people with them. This is kind of like what I want to do and I think that his techniques could help me collage the words effectively.

This is one of his pieces. I think that his motivation behind this piece is to pick a poem that represents the person or has great meaning to them and then actually create the person from that poem. It also connects to the meaning behind my idea because it represents how important words can be to people and how much power just a few words could have on someone's life. I love the intricacy he uses when places the words next to each other to get the wonderful detail that is seen is all of his artwork. I wish I could collage words that intricately but I would definitely need more practice.