It’s been a weird year and a lot of weirder things have happened. It seems like for the past 10 years or so something crazy has come up or erupted in our social fabric which has left many people confused and frustrated. One of the biggest things I have noticed now in this ‘new normal’ is how people are behaving when they are forced to put a drastic pause on their busy lives and sit inside all day until this storm has cleared. For some there my be some benefits such as picking up a new hobby or talking to loved ones more. However there are still individuals who are now forced to deal with certain aspects of their lives they have been putting off now that there are no distractions and they have more time to deal with them.
I thought about this and realized as a society we really do look down on negative emotions and encourage the public to stray away from those feelings. But they’re feelings right? They’re there for a reason. Then I thought maybe, is there a healthy way to utilize these ‘bad emotions’ into something good? And if there are ways (which there are) why do most people wait until their mid life crisis to confront them? That’s when I decided to teach them while they’re young.
Now I would not consider myself an authority on children’s literature however I wanted to make something creative that goes beyond what is the current norm in emotional education. I made anger my emotion of choice because to me it is a highly constructive emotion; it inspires action. In the right doses, I believe anger is a huge motivator and can be wielded for good and not evil. I wanted to keep it light at the same time so it could be relatable to kids, so why not make some wacky characters? What if they’re food items? Better yet HEALTHY food items? So many directions I could go in now…I like the way I think.
and *POOF* the Angry Grape was born!
This was quite a challenging and rewarding project. I primarily illustrated everything in Photoshop with my Wacom tablet which was quite therapeutic. I am also pretty happy with the art style as well, mainly because I made myself less concerned about the technique and just have fun with it. I think the hardest part was initially drawing the grape’s body which made me have to hotkey the ‘undo’ function on my tablet which I probably clicked 300 times.
Overall I am quite happy with the final result. Best of all you can read it right now! Isn’t that great? More reading!