Project theme: My Way, an object of personal cartography. ✖️ 2 weeks (26/01/2021 – 08/02/2021)
Brief: Create a visual representation of your ‘journey’ to the MA Communication Design programme that includes a profile of your current interests, skills and strengths. How you interpret the brief is open to your imagination, but your work should be based on features and characteristics of a map. You can interpret the idea of a journey metaphorically or literally. Visual elements will also be used to create a background video image for your online teaching session.
「Me」
is always a very funny and deep topic for me.
Every moment or experience in my life, joys, sorrows, gain, loss, good or bad fortune, is wonderful and meaningful experience when I look back on them.
In this project, I decide to rewind one of the most deep experience in my life —- a special personality. I had suffered from it for many years in my growth, and I am still learning how to get along with it with a new state of mind. It just like a hidden birthmark on my body.
Once I thought I will probably never escape from it till I found a woman call Elaine Aron, she is the first person who put forward a concept called HSP (highly sensitive person).
After that, I start a new journey, a journey of self-exploring. I found out several familiar behaviors and thoughts in her first book called ‘The Highly Sensitive Person–How To Thrive When The World Overwhelms You’ and got lots of useful ideas and suggestions in her other relative work, I can now understand every reason of my pain and behaviors, and that is also the reason why I can recall and describe it in this project.
My Research Process…
I divided my work into 5 steps to describe different period of my experience.
- Step 1 :Unaware of it，I have to bear the pain it brought to me.
Keywords: Gene
Depressive childhood-terrible dad
The sound of a quarrel
Fears
Clash
Violence
Imagining possible harm
- Step 2 : I can feel it and start to realize there must be something different about me.
keywords:
Calm down
Stop complaining
Searching
- Step 3 : I began to look for relevant works and researches to explore and understand my Highly Sensitivity.
Keywords:
Elaine Aron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elaine_Aron
relative web. https://hsperson.com/books/the-highly-sensitive-person/
books Aron, Elaine. The highly sensitive person. Kensington Publishing Corp., 2013.
relative works(documentary/ film/ interview/ vedio) https://sensitivelovers.vhx.tv/ https://sensitivethemovie.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DezjkilrSY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5E6ys44FXo
A lecture on highly sensitive person https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQLBnUBKggY&t=3s (Part 1 Research) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYTeeytvuwo (Part 2 Life) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIHveOz2AX0 (Part 3 Q&A)
- Step 4 : I found out Sensitivity can not only brought pain, but also can bring me lots of gifts that I’ve never realized.
keywords: Sharply contrasting
Start to establish a new state of mind
Try to get along with it harmoniously
- Step 5 : I learned how to adjust myself when I fell into this feeling .
Have a deeper understanding about HSP in different perspective, especially in three main scenes, social life, dating life, career life.
Get how to adjust myself when I found myself overstimulated.
Get how to playing to my strength from sensitivity.
My Design Process…
According to my research and classification, I started to draw my sketch. My setting about this project is an expression of emotion, so I believe illustration would be the best choice. Pattern, mark and colour would make my work more vivid.
Poor family relationship during childhood brought out the highly sensitivity in my gene, At that stage, what I felt most deeply was fear. It was an imaginary fear. The sound of quarreling and clash could come at any moment. All I could do was hide under the table, close my eyes, cover my ears, and eavesdropping, conflict is common but blurry. The memory of the whole childhood is depressed, so the tone should be a bit dark, deep and blue.I use psychedelic crooked line can describe this situation.
These psychedelic crooked line looks like two people disputing with each other, accuse each other.I inspired from a oil painting called Quarrel Duet 148 ( K 8 ) Paul Klee 1879 – 1940 Switzerland Swiss.
After that, I started to draw the difficult but revolutionary experience (stage 2& 3), and when I found these research and people who face similar situation as me, I felt a sense of salvation, a moment of insight up arrived, and I realized that I had found my cure, and that it was magical, and that I had found so many things hidden within me. Strong-contracting colour and blurry melting text (research about HSP) will be used to demonstrate two states of sensitivity (gift and burden), and the background colour would become much brighter and positive, that is a stage I absolutely enjoy, I would use Strong bold colours to describe this feeling .
In fact, Highly sensitivity can help me if I If I choose a job about helping people or about art , or learn how to adjust myself in appropriate way, my sensitivity will be a gift instead of a burden.
In the final stage(stage 4 & 5),It’s a process of putting what I knew into practice, and it can be regarded as a process of self-compromise. I realized that the HSP is like an invisible birthmark or another me. She will stay with me till I die, I can’t throw her away, so why not be kind to her? That is the reason I would going to depict a kiss, with the meaning of compromise.
Finally,
The
Draft
Came
Out
………….
I was really struggling with putting colour, i was wondering how to make the color fit the story better, not just dispersedly lying on the background. Some picture(partly collage) inspired me. For example, this illustration below put strong red along the face’s structure, which is a good way to differentiate stages, it would not influence the demonstration of the development of the whole story playing of colour.
Now,
Allow Me
Introduce My Outcome
