❀Where do I get my artistic inspiration from?

To me, inspirations often come from our daily lives. I often got my artistic inspirations from words, my own experiences, daily objects and my relationship with other people. 
Here is an example:

【Inspired by words】

I was one of the designers for our school yearbook's theme. I wished to make our yearbook unique from other schools. There are thousands of schools in the world, but each school’s name makes it unique; thus I started with our school’s name---University Hill Secondary, “u-hill” for short. By reading the name, the first thing I thought about was a hill, so I decided to make the theme of “hill.” However, I knew it was still too common, so I decided to add some “humanity.” I used the letter “u” in our school’s name to represent the pronoun “you.” By using this word, I was able to incorporate the human element in the phrase “you-hill.”

 

【inspired by my own experiences】

After I settled on the basic idea, I started to think where to add the “humanity” factor to my design. When I was drawing, I remembered I once wrote an essay about climbing. I talked about the difficulties I had, and when I finally reached the top of the mountain, I was happy that I did not give up so that I could enjoy the spectacular view. In the conclusion, I wrote that “life is like climbing a mountain, you have to face many hardships, but you will enjoy the process when you finally realize your dream.” I could utilize my essay’s idea here, and let the person represent “you” while the trip of climbing the hill symbolizes a person who is experiencing life at University Hill Secondary.

  As I was drawing the picture of the person for the table of contents, I imagined him climbing higher and higher, symbolizing that as he gets older and completes each grade, he is coming closer to his goal. As the slope gets steeper, the level of his schooling is becoming more challenging making the person more mature.

  
【inspried by daily objects】

   I had a really hard time thinking of how to design such an important part of the yearbook---its cover. It seemed too simple to just have a person standing on a hill. And my teacher told the class that a new artificial glass cover could be used for the yearbook’s design. I did not want to waste this special material, but I had no idea how to use it until two things inspired me. The first one was a card I received from my friend which had two layers. I was intrigued by the idea of “double exposure.” I wanted to keep my original idea of “a person standing on the hill” on the glass page, covering our school’s name which is written on the page underneath.

 

  After I drew it, the design looked too showy. The two layers of color looked massy when they were placed together; I was not satisfied with that. I was inspired again when I saw a student standing in front of the French window creating a silhouette. This inspired me to make the design on the glass page a silhouette, so the color wouldn’t be too massy. By using visual contrast, I adopted the black silhouette and the colorful background as the style for my whole yearbook’s design.

 

 

【inspired by my relationship with other people】

I recalled that my friends encouraged me many times when I was climbing the mountain; I couldn’t have done it without their help. So I decided to integrate this social element into my design. Every yearbook has two endsheets, and these two pages often look identical. I thought this was boring so I made some changes. For the front endsheet, the person was climbing alone. But on the back endsheet, the person is standing on the top of the hill with many friends. The comparison implies that he met many people when he was climbing the hill, and friendship made him stronger.