The Warmth of an Avatar

It is funny how you can tell so much about someone by their art just by watching where their mind will take them. Often people I talk to fail to see how a simple drawing can be a journey, but it really is. It is a journey into the artist’s mind. VPontbriand22 is a Senior at Oak Hill High School that does dance, likes to four-wheel, snowmobile, and loves to draw. After graduating high school she wants to study cosmetology at Aveda. Her avatar has the ocean as a deep blue color covering the bottom portion of the box with a palm tree on the left side of the box and a sun covering the top right corner. This avatar emits a sort of warmth to the viewer that reminds the viewer of warm summer days on the beach with family and friends.

What stood out to me in this avatar was how it so well incorporated the artist’s personality with such an awesome design. The warmth of the design reminds the viewer of not only their best memories on the beach but the warmth VPontbriand22 emits to her friends, family, and peers alike. Another thing that stands out to the viewer is how well drawn and neat it is. This is also a mirror reflection of the artist and how neat and organized she is with her daily activities and plans for the future. The avatar represents how gifted and skilled she is pertaining to the arts and how well she will do with her future goals.

However good the avatars may be, the process to designing them and the overall result were very different. When coming up with the blue in her avatar and the ocean she “…chose the ocean because it’s pretty.” (VPontbriand22) I chose my dark blue background because I wanted it to mean something. I wanted everything to represent something in my avatar because I wanted my avatar to closely represent who I am as a person. However, VPontbriand22 did not use that same process for every symbol. I chose my dark blue color to symbolize how cool the design is as well as my admiration and deep respect for the ocean. When she decided to pencil the palm tree into her avatar she “…chose it because it is at beaches and she likes the beach.” (VPontbriand22) In terms of drawing something into my avatar solely because I like where you can find it, I did the same thing with the gold color because I love the pineapples on Hawaiian Pizza. Finally she chose to add the sun into her avatar because she “…chose the sun because it’s bright and pretty.” (VPontbriand22) For the sun she again chose that one to help complete the avatar and incidentally spoke a lot about her personality by doing so. My process in adding the wings around the fleur-de-lis was to add in something from running so the wings from the cross country logo was what I foresaw to be the best looking.

In conclusion, I drew my avatar in the overall theme of trying to represent me as a person and where I came from. My process definitely took longer than intended because I could not decide on what I wanted to have in my avatar that I would be proud of. VPontbriand22 took the route of a great looking, more cosmetic-based avatar. Like I said though, however different our processes may have been I believe that the results turned out to be pretty great. Most of all I am proud of my classmate who came up with such a great design to represent themselves so well.

“beach” by barnyz is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0