I won an award for my “Wrapped in my Own Anxiety” art scarf.

Hey, so I won an award at an art show this week. Think that might be worth sharing?

I’m taking this digital drawing class this semester, and the first assignment required us to create an oversized piece.

I decided before I started working on the piece that I wasn’t going to pay the money to print on an oversized piece of paper just because that was the requirement. I think that is wasteful of both my monetary resources and of our earth’s resources. Instead, I searched for alternative mediums. I  knew that my piece was going to touch on emotions, but I wasn’t sure what I would focus on until I found the medium I on which would print the piece. I found Art of Where and saw that I could print on a scarf. I thought it would be interesting to make a piece about invisible illnesses and print it on something that you wear as a piece of fashion and literally wrap yourself in for others to see.

I decided to focus on anxiety, since I was experiencing it at a high level during the time I created this piece. I dealt with the idea of flight because anxiety (to me) tends to take off like a bird, plane, or — sometimes — a rocket, and eventually lets go and you land back where you should be. I created a linear storyline with these images and repeated some motifs that often show up in my own anxieties (gender issues, scheduling, relationship issues, etc.).

Here is the final piece.

I flipped it on its side so you could see it better since it’s a wide piece. This is created from mixed media that I scanned in and manipulated in Photoshop using brushes. I call it “Wrapped in my Own Anxiety”.

I’m planning to create a series of invisible illness scarves. I’m open to ideas about which illnesses I should cover.

… oops … wrong year on the image. Should be 2014.

Have you ever won an award for something? OR Do you have an invisible illness that you feel comfortable sharing?