In our first session we were tasked with choosing an oxymoron from a given list and we had to create a quick illustration on our chosen oxymoron. We all sketched out a few ideas of the first things that came to our heads when we thought about our chosen words which were ‘Quiet Storm’. We had a variety of ideas in which we paired together things we thought about each of the two words. I started off with literal ideas of each word, for example someone sleeping and being quiet, birds chirping etc for ‘quiet’ and wind, rain and lightning for ‘storm’. I thought about these ideas but decided the literal approach was one which may not be as effective, and adding someone sleeping with rainstorm might not be as powerful as using a metaphorical interpretation.
We then had a discussion as a group and the most promising idea we could come up with was using a quiet storm to link back to our theme of mental health. Mental health illness are known to be ‘silent killers’ and we thought the main reason for the name is that many people with mental illnesses feel like they can’t talk about there problems for any reason. The ‘storm’ part we decided could be portrayed as the ‘storm’ or mass of thoughts going on inside their head. I drew a few illustrations to experiment with this idea.
My first sketch was playing around with the idea of a storm, I drew the body looking slightly uncomfortable, with dark clouds to represent the storm and dark thoughts which could be going on inside their head. I played with the idea of replacing the head with the clouds which could represent the ‘quiet’ part of the oxymoron as they are not able to speak out. For the second sketch I tried to take a different approach by making it look more ‘sketchy’ and messy. I think it portrays the overall mood of the drawing much more than clean lines would. I kept the mouth closed to give the impression that they can’t or don’t want to speak out, with the ‘voices’ inside his head trying to get out.
Ben Jackson 