Final Design Project

Title: Hall of Guilt
Theme: Social Media Issues
Artist: Hong Shi Min
Student ID: B1101991

In this modern era, social media apparently has become an essential element in our daily life. Social media allow us to create, share and exchange information or ideas in a very creative and efficient way. Yet, social media doesn’t merely bring benefits. Nowadays, social media issues have come out in an increasing rate. Social media issues include security, privacy, scam, cyber-bullying, cyber-harassment and so on. Cyber-bullying is when a child, preteen or teen is harassed, threatened, tormented, embarrassed, humiliated or otherwise targeted by another child, preteen or teen using the Internet, interactive and digital technologies or mobile phones. Cyber bullying has different forms. It may involve sending threatening, mean and vulgar messages or images, posting private and sensitive information about others, spreading rumors and deliberately excluding someone from an online social group. Cyber bullying can be as simple as sending an email, yet, the effects brought to the victims can be very serious. For instance, damaged reputation, depression and even suicide attempt.

My idea is to not only show that cyber-bullying is peccant and morbid, but also to create awareness of cyber-bullying. I have come out with few popular social media to involve in my painting which includes social networks, video and photo sharing websites and website search engine. They are YouTube, Google, Weibo, Stumble, Flickr and Badoo. Instead of using the logo or words, I only used colors of the icons to represent these social media. The context of my artwork is showing portraits being exhibited in a hall, named “Hall of Guilt”, and the artists of these portraits are the descriptions of cyber-bully. As you can see in my artwork, the artist of each portrait to show that cyber-bully is an offender, anonymizer, stalker, liar and threatener. The concept of my painting is using Cubism to show the interaction between cyber-bully and social media. Other than that, geometry has been used in my artwork to bring the effects of hands randomly and subtly showing on the wall. 

     Here's my sketch!

Here's my under drawing.

I created a new layer and painted the portraits.

the "Hall of Guilt" signboard was colored and I used Gradient and Subtract effect. The frames were colored using brush and different tones as well.

I used Bevel & Emboss and Inner Glow effects to make the portraits having glass effect.

I created few layers to put different colors of geometry on the background and lower the opacity to make the spatial effect.

I cropped the part I wanted from Google's image and dropped a shadow. I created a layer for the shadow so that I could copy the shadow and paste it to my artwork.

 Here you can see the copied shadow was pasted on the background and lowered the opacity.

  I have repeated the making and copying shadow steps therefore you can see there are a lot of hands on the wall.

Lastly, I put text for the portraits.

Here's my artwork.
"Hall of Guilt"

Artist Statement:

My artwork explores the relationship between social media and internet users and takes a critical view of cyber-bullying. Cubism makes subtle combination of the portraits and the colors of social media icons. The use of transparency of color and the geometry applied on the wall give viewers a different spatial impression. While seeing this artwork, I hope the viewers can imagine yourselves standing in this Hall of Guilt, looking at the portraits, and have introspection if you have ever done cyber-bullying. The hands from the wall are trying to make connection with you, be aware of cyber-bullying!