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Have you ever seen a transformation between a human to a wolf in a werewolf movie where during the transformation the character kind of just flips back and forth really quickly between each skin? A less violent version of that concept is what I was going for when making my design. I have different faces for different situations and environments, and I live my life constantly switching between them. My brain works similarly, always bouncing back and forth between ideas and concepts. My thoughts are never really still so I wanted to create an image that also showcased movement of some kind. To achieve this, I layered three images of myself to represent both how it feels inside my head and how I am constantly changing. I also tried to incorporate a lot of colors because I’m a very colorful person and I enjoy bright, happy things.

This assignment was challenging for me because my initial plans started in a completely different direction than my end result (which is very similar to how I visualize my brain working). Originally, I intended to draw my icon, but I’m not very artistically talented when it comes to getting what is in my brain onto paper. I started out by brainstorming all the things I enjoy doing and then sketching those things in a fun arrangement. I ended up hating this first sketch for 2 main reasons: 1) My interests are constantly changing and therefore very random. I go through very short phases of being obsessed with something for a couple of weeks before moving on to another interest, so I have a lot of very small interests, but none of them really seem significant to my life nor do they seem to accurately represent who I am as a person. 2) Because of the randomness of my interests, the drawing seemed to lack connection or flow, but instead looked like a bunch of random images that were simply thrown together on the page. I didn’t like this because I like organization and my sketch was the opposite of that. So, in my final icon, instead of including literal symbols of my hobbies, I decided to represent them by including boxes of divided color to demonstrate how my hobbies are random, yet still somewhat overlap between different categories. Next, I attempted to draw myself, but this went even worse than the first sketch (who knew trying to recreate a picture of yourself could be such a toxic activity), so I decided to edit an image of myself using pixlr which brought along a new batch of difficulties due to my inexperience with editing. Besides the technological difficulties, I’m excessively anal about unimportant details, and therefore having too many choices really distracts and stresses me out, so as minor as it seems, figuring out the correct font and color for my name was very difficult for me and I probably spent an excessive amount of time on that one detail. Despite these challenges, I am very happy with the end result.