YouthFest

Escaping Your Grip by Dayton

The piece that I have created represents the concept and idea of being trapped down by your mental demons and how drastically they can affect you. I wanted to create a piece that had a very open ended meaning, in terms that everyone could interpret their own explanation behind my art. This piece allows the viewer to reflect and connect to the message based on their experiences with mental health and the trauma each individual has gone through. Personally, with a past of mental health, the hand represents my mind, and the everlasting grip it’s thoughts of anxiety have had on me. These negative thoughts (represented by the strings) restricted me from reaching my goals and held me back from reaching my full potential. Resulting in me feeling like a puppet. However, in the past few years I have been able to realize that I must mute my negative thoughts and follow what my heart wants. This has allowed the strings to slowly break, letting me free from the extreme lows of mental health.

For this art piece I used the majority of the same medium. This medium being black pen with a slight addition of red pencil crayon. I chose to use the very monotone black colour to continue to share the dark and sad perspective of mental health. With that I used the scratch line technique to create the “messy” aspect of anxiety and its struggles. I feel that this was very effective as it ties very well to the theme of the piece, while still maintaining a clean and creative look. I also added a small detail of red pencil crayon to draw the viewer's eye, along with sharing the concept of one's heart having power over their mind. Again, I feel that this idea clearly shares the hidden positivity in the piece in an effective way that is easy to understand. Overall, I feel that this piece is very attention grabbing and extremely unique in terms of concept and overall design.

Kelsey's artwork

Crying Uke

I often resort to music as an outlet for my feelings. I find comfort when I'm absorbed in it.

Glass Horns

In this piece, I wanted to illustrate someone who has pent up feelings finding comfort at the sudden burst of rain. Their horns holds liquid which I interpret to be feelings that is bottle up and the glowing eyes, mouth, and nails signify the need for it to be exposed.

Green Goo

In this piece, the character is struggling, physically and mentally, trying not to drown in the green liquid. The green liquid could signify anything; sadness, jealousy, anger, it's really up for interpretation but the way I've been thinking about it is mainly these three.

Green String

This piece depicts someone who finds themselves attached to many things such as people, memories, etc. The strings become so attached to the person that they find it hard to let go when the time comes.

Nosebleed on the Ferry

It's a specific type of experience where after many troubling events, one finds themselves sitting down, under a quiet atmosphere, just thinking. Contemplating. Reflecting. Many thoughts run through their head yet they aren't overwhelmed nor stressed. They're just existing.

Moon by Liza

My piece is about mental health that relates to a variety of human emotions, illness, and behaviors. It shows how an individual suffers from anxiety and depression. I put faces that represent different kinds of expressions of a person when they are dealing with their mental issues. My life experiences influenced my work by showing how I feel when I deal with my problems and anxiety attacks. Through the process of providing sketches of faces, my ideas have developed to add in more details over time.

I used a mechanical pencil and shading pencil because it makes shading easier rather than using my finger. I like to listen to music while working. To add more details I would like to use painting

Puzzling by Daphne

My work deals with the issues of mental health, specifically depression. I decided to explore such a topic because I believe that depression is the largest epidemic in humanity. Such massive difficulty that is yet to be understood comprehensively. My primary interest in this piece is to focus on a benevolent facial expression while in a simple way, introducing a lack of colour. Through this, I am able to provide the contrasts of opposing natures. As an individual who struggles with their own mental health, I view depression as a normal persona that lacks something in themself. Someone who struggles to understand something in their own being. On the other hand, as someone who is infused in artistry, I invest in using my own talents into putting my own ideas into a more physical form. Such a choice resulted in this artwork. Throughout the years of producing art, I have come to realize that mentality really does put a lot of development into my work.

I decided to choose this theme because I believe that it is essential for me to base my work on something that I can understand in order to provide a successful result. In terms of process, I prefer work with music, as it tends to emphasize my thoughts. It tends to allow me to put up some more ideas into my work. However, I do want to explore the process of detail shading a little more just so that I could clarify the details of the physical forms of my work.

Rhys' artwork

Two of the pieces feature a character with a hole in their stomach. One of the symptoms of depression is losing interest and motivation in everyday activities and things you normally love, and I showed this my a literal piece of someone missing. The two different pictures are commentary on different things though. The first is showing how things can be beautiful and perfect around you and you can still be suffering for no apparent reason, where the other is showing how depression doesn’t look menacing at first, represented by a weird floating fairy thing, but it still robs you of all you love.

The piece of a black figure in a room with nothing in it is showing what it feels like to not be able to do anything you normally would, and how it feels when your interests and personality seemingly aren’t really there. It feels like there is nobody that understands or cares and that’s why the figure is alone. The figure could be anyone and they could be anywhere yet it always feels terrible.

The piece with a person surrounded by scribbles was originally just me experimenting with an art supply and held no value or meaning, but it ended up being a pretty accurate picture of how dissociation changes the way I view myself. There aren’t any concrete surroundings and the eyes don’t look focused on anything and most importantly I don’t draw people like that.

The last piece is another vague character that could be anyone in something that resembles water. It feels like you are drowning. Life slowly becomes difficult and then you are suddenly drowning in it. Nothing about it feels pleasant and depression and isolation can sometimes make it feel like you are taking a much needed break from caring, but eventually it gets to you and it isn’t so good anymore. When you start losing friends, interests and community it no longer feels like a break but it feels like there is nothing you can do about it.

Two Face by Jester

The issue I'm exploring is social anxiety and trying to fit in. I chose this theme because I feel like people in this day in age are more concerned with fitting in than rather being their true selves. The underlying concept of my art is that she puts on a fake mask and a skull which means she is dead inside and a cold heart hangs from her hands. I drew from my experiences from my childhood to help me conceptualize this theme.

Two Sides by Hailey

My piece for the mental health artwork assignment was based on my own personal experiences as well as things many other people can relate to. I decided to paint a faceless girl with two sides, positive and negative/light and dark. The one side is black and grey to symbolize the dark side of mental health such as depression and anxiety, there's little symbols along the entire piece and on the dark side it consists of sad symbols that symbolize pain, sadness, low energy etc. And the other side is very colourful to symbolize happiness and it consists of symbols such as flowers, full of energy, happiness, etc. The point of the piece is to show both sides are important, both matter and you can't live without both of them because the grey side makes the colourful side so much brighter than before.

For my project I used acrylic paint. I used it because it is my favourite form of paint because you can make as many mistakes as you want and still be able to fix it. On the grey side I used black and white, as well as a bunch of variations of grey to add contrast. And for the light side I used a burgundy colour for the hoodie, peach for the face, brown for the hair, dark purple for the glasses, light yellow for the background, and a bunch of colours for the symbols like green, purple, pink, blue, etc.