Bipolar Disorder

To start the first image of the series, I needed to establish a process I would use through the entire project. Each project started with the written word. I researched what I could about Bipolar Disorder just to understand its symptoms and to inspire ideas. Instead of writing down paragraphs or statements, I wrote words, letters, ideas from my research and interviewed a friend who suffers with this disorder. After soaking in enough information about this subject, I started making symbols out of my work lists. These symbols would translate into shapes, the shapes are given form to become volumetric illustrations that contain both a concept and a narrative.

Because the brain is the center of the nervous system, it generates all of the nervous functions including the mind. However this disorder creates duality of being either manic or depressive. Relative to the science, I used the idea of ying and yang or black and white. In this case, manic represented something warm, breezy and alive and bright. Whereas depressive represented something sterile and cool. The function of this design was to present a strong duality in just seeing the emotions of each face. The Manic face on the left represents optimism, happiness and euphoria. The left face represents sadness, hopelessness and pessimism. The process was complicated, exhaustive and involved a bit of note taking and academic research. However all that was towards reaching a better understanding of my topic. The image was rendered on Bristol and then transferred onto watercolor paper, each face was painted separately and then collaged digitally.