Art Explosion | Deviance

This is my entry for this week's Art Explosion Contest hosted by @juliakponsford. The theme is deviance which for me means being a rebel, thinking outside the box and breaking rules to be unconventional. This kinda reminds me of the matrix and how Neo and crew are basically deviants. It made me think of how the matrix could be a metaphor for any kind of system that keeps you trapped, and how you've got to be a deviant to break through it. In someways I'm a deviant for choosing an unconventional path in life. This imagery of unplugging and disconnecting from a system resonated with me and I thought I'd use that metaphor to graphically represent my idea of deviance.

I start by going over a rough pencil sketch with the brush tool on Adobe Illustrator.

Once the outlines are done I fill out the cables with smaller strokes.

I flip the colours to have a good background for my green matrix style codes.

I then use the silhouette as a clipping mask for a watercolour texture. I thought I'd take the art to the next level and make it move. To make the gif, I simply exchange the 1s and 0s to make it look like the line is moving. I also change the background of the watercolours to go through the spectrum. I got 16 separate images by doing this and then string them together to make a gif. I'm still getting used to animation and it doesn't flow as well as I could've made it but it's still rather flashy. I used giphy to connect and then decorate my images.

With any free online gif maker, the output quality is a lot less than my image sources, but it's a sacrifice worth making to have a moving image.

This was the first gif I've ever made from scratch and it was an interesting and fun process. With time I'll get better at making those gifs flow and figure out how to do them with Photoshop so I can have some HD gifs.