Advent Illustration: Behind the Scenes

This year I created an illustration a day from the first of December until Christmas day – depicting 25 things of what Christmas means to me.

Day 13 – Making Christmas Cards

The idea came to me when I was illustrating another advent calendar with ‘traditional’ Christmas icons such as snowmen, gingerbread men, bells and angels. When I was making it I thought that despite being the symbols usually associated with the festive period, they don’t relate at all to my personal experience of Christmas. For example, it rarely snows in Yorkshire in December – so snowmen are out off the question! Scenes such as church choirs performing and bells ringing are also very far removed from my own memories of the season.

I made these illustrations to represent what my Christmas is like, and what is significant about it for me. This meant that the drawings often showed spending time with my family, eating a lot of food, and enjoying / enduring the traditions of the holiday.

The winter cold is an inevitable part of the Christmas season! This was Day 17 of my advent illustration.

My favorite illustrations were Winter Walks, Getting the Sniffles and Making Mulled Wine. I felt that the illustrations were quite strong, and these were all things that happen every December without fail – despite not being traditionally ‘Christmassy’.

Day 10 – Making Mulled Wine

Each illustration took about 2 hours to complete – plus or minus some time depending on the level of detail. Things such as drawing expressions or trying to create a likeness of a real person took significantly longer, whereas drawing scenes with just objects (such as Day 4 – Mince Pies with Brandy Butter) was a lot quicker.

Half-way through an illustration – drawing in pen over the initial pencil sketch

I didn’t realise that it would take me this long to draw each picture before I started, which meant that I had to alter my daily schedule to fit them all in. Often I would wake up early before work to get a head start, and got into the rhythm of drawing through my lunch break with a sandwich in one hand and a pro-marker in the other. Before the weekends, I would create a few illustrations in one intense evening and set up my social media posts for Saturday and Sunday so that I could actually have a social life too!

Working in my lunch break at a cafe on Day 10 – Winter Walks

Due to the time constraints, I went straight into each picture in pencil and then pen without planning the layout on a separate piece of paper beforehand (like I normally do for illustrations and comics). This meant that the pictures weren’t as good quality as I had wanted, and some were experiments that I pulled off with varying degrees of success.

At the start of the project, I chose a colour palette and stuck to it throughout the illustrations. I incorporated the traditional Christmas colours of red and green, but also added warm tones of pink, brown and orange. These colours not only gave off a nice cosy vibe to me, but were also ‘practical’ natural colours which I could use in most situations easily. For instance, the pink and brown I could use for skin, hair and eye colour in the cartoon characters, and the greens and oranges worked well for outdoor scenes.

The only time I broke this colour scheme (by incorperating two blue tones into the mix) was to illustrate Day 8 – My Blue Velvet Dress and Day 15 – The Trip to the Attic, to depict shadow in a more accessible way.

Keeping the pink and gold from the original colour scheme, and adding dark and light blue

A few days into the advent, my friend, talented watercolour artist Rebecca Freeman, joined in the challenge and drew 25 illustrations of what Christmas means to her. Follow her Facebook art page here for more illustrations!

Day 16 of Rebecca Freeman‘s advent illustration

Overall, making an advent illustration a day was very fun – although I have to admit there were a few moments I felt I’d bitten off more than I could chew, or wanted to slack off for a night! By the end however I managed to create 25 illustrations, and post all – except one – on time on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook each day. Unfortunately, Day 5 was 18 minutes late due to it falling on date night – my bad.

My  invariably messy desk on Day 23 of the advent challenge

Many thanks to everyone who has liked, commented and otherwise sent me good vibes throughout this process! Your support was a huge motivation to stick to it and finish the project.

Click here to see the full album of advent illustrations on my Facebook page.

If you haven’t already, feel free to follow me on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter for updates on my art in progress and more pieces. Also keep an eye on this blog for a variety of articles on art and other topics that interest me.

Want to see more of my artwork? See my previous blog post showing my sketchbook in Cambodia.

Thanks for reading!

 

 

Are Selfies Bad?

Selfie culture has taken over our social media and become a part of everyday life. But should we embrace the fad or take a step back from this strange segment of online culture?

The growing prevalence of taking selfies does not mean that our culture is getting more vain or more image conscious – pride and vanity in our appearance has always been there, in every culture, in every time period. It is just that now we have found a new way to express it. However, showing our vanity through the medium of selfies is much more acceptable now, to the point that it is celebrated and encouraged through systems of approval such as ‘liking’ photos and posts on social media.

Selfies are after all a way of controlling our appearance, and therefore how we are perceived by others. It is only natural to want to show our best side in order to represent ourselves well. However, controlling our own image to the extent that we now take it only makes our standard of beauty (for ourselves and others) much higher. This promotes negativity about natural, uncontrolled, unflattering images of people, to the point that we will criticize and try to disassociate ourselves from “ugly” pictures by ‘untagging’ ourselves or censoring which photos we share. This high standard for our own image creates dissatisfaction about how we really look and an unwillingness to embrace our whole self, warts and all.

My selfies

Whatever the consequences to our mental health, the fact is that taking selfies is now part of our culture. As sociable animals, it is a natural instinct to want to fit into our society and associate with our peers. Avoiding being in photos can result in people thinking that you do not fit into normal society or that you are purposely isolating yourself from it. This may lead to further social exclusion, meaning participating in selfies is in some way necessary for our social survival.

Furthermore, the act of taking selfies has become a bonding experience for people. It is a way of documenting and celebrating our relationships with people – whether long-term or fleeting – and showing other people that we have accepted them into our social circle. When we look back at the photographs, we get pleasure from remembering the connection and the happy memories that we associate with the image.

Like the act of taking a photo brings us closer together, sharing it gives us confirmation that we have been accepted by our society. Sharing a selfie is a way of getting direct feedback on the way we present ourselves through comments and ‘likes’ on social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. Receiving this (usually positive) feedback reinforces the idea that we are valued by, and fit into, our society.

It is definitely not healthy to need to receive this feedback, since it means our sense of self-worth is determined by something external to ourselves. A much better attitude would be to be comfortable in our own skin and to not need other people to openly tell us that we are looking great to believe it. However, such confidence is not so easily obtained, and therefore it is only natural to seek it from people who we also admire and who’s opinions we value.

Documenting friendship through selfies

In the long run, the world is changing, and as animals who live in a complex and highly social society, we must adapt to fit into it. The alternative is to be left behind by our peers, and potentially to be considered as old fashioned, stubborn, strange or unsociable. When we stop to consider the act of taking selfies, we realize how shallow and strange the concept actually is. However, it only stems from a natural and very important desire to belong in human society.

In general, selfies do not harm anyone, they are not evil or cause cancer or destroy rainforests. However, neither do they promote acceptance about the way we naturally look and can actually diminish our sense of self-worth. Overall, we should not over-indulge in this modern pastime. We should not take ourselves or the images of ourselves too seriously, and remember that the number of ‘likes’ on our latest profile picture does not equate to our level of beauty.

Your true friends will be the ones enjoying your body positivity (and probably ‘liking’ all of those photos), but equally will be the ones who couldn’t care less if you never took a selfie in your life.