A campaign I did in April 09 as part of my degree.
Coming from South Africa and having lived in Malawi and Zimbabwe, I was no stranger to the violence and unrest in Africa. However in 2006 I was horrified to hear what was happening to children in Uganda as well as in five other African nations, where children were being forced to fight in wars even though they are barely able to hold a gun. This has perviously been a topic I have tackled in my painting and artwork, but in April 2009 I got given an open brief assignment in illustration, drawing and graphics and decided to hit the issue again, this time in a more graphic way and with a campaign idea of billboards. Because this was just a course project, I knew these posters would never make it to a real billboard to expose the issue and effect the way people think. However, I saw it as training; Training to try and address the issue of awareness by using visual communication, as well as extend the way I work and think in order to grow and nurture those skills.
One of the things that excites me the most is getting an idea and then thinking how can I create and communicate it. It's one thing to have the idea but to make it come to life is a totally different challenge altogether. I did this just before the 'Big Splash' fad and so had nothing to go by. I knew for these images I wanted to create something I hadn't seen before and I liked the idea of showing the extreme violence of war (particularly in the image with the bombs). However these are children so I didn't want tit to be too gory, and as they were billboards I didn't want it to be too 'in your face'; I wanted to get people thinking about what was going on: The milk/liquid was the perfect solution, as it expressed the explosive bombs perfectly yet was soft and unreal.
By chance I threw mandarin into the milk cup and it made perfect splashes that really suited the explosive energy I was looking for.
Note: Some of these illustrations are based on other peoples photographs (as I had no way of taking photos of the children) so I used references and added guns etc.
