At first the idea of this exercise wasn’t exactly appealing since the exercise involved a still life work. That meant making use of a sketchbook and I’d gotten very accustomed to creating solid work on the computer, but to make a still life on the computer just felt wrong, almost like I’d be cheating. Regardless, I sat down at my desk and stared at the brief, trying to decide which word I would go with from the given four; this continued for five whole minutes before I gave up and started looking for things to draw. And the word disaster eventually caught my attention as the words revolved around my head, because one was recently experienced on a global scale: the COVID-19 Pandemic. At that point, I was able to formulate a plan.

Immediately, I found myself a disposable mask and searched for red ink to use as blood on the mask, as I’d heard of people coughing blood that had accumulated in the lungs due to the lesions caused by the virus, although I’d never seen it myself.

And thus I placed the mask in a space with good lighting and began drawing it out. I have never been so engrossed in a still life assignment anywhere before this.

I struggled quite a bit at first, I had either completely lost practice, or I just have a bad memory and have never been good at still life. But I kept at it, I wanted to see where this went because I already had very low expectations in terms of the outcome. All I needed was a decent looking still life drawing that I could use to create a final image on the computer. Eventually, the shading stopped looking as solid and purposeful as before, they started looking more organic and natural.

By this point the fatigue had begun to kick in, but I figured I’d give another shot or two before perhaps changing the subject or the word. What I ended up with were two rather impressive looking still life drawings, I say impressive because as I said before, I didn’t expect it anything all that great to come out of it anyway. So, in short, these would more than do.

Then came the editing and colourising process, which, as usual I did on photoshop.

Finally, almost in a poster format, I placed the image on a red background with a thick black border with the title “The Disaster of COVID-19” below it. While it is a rather obvious message, for someone without context, perhaps children in the future, this might bring about questions of what happened during the onslaught of COVID-19. I used a very thin Helvetica Now font for the title, considering how gentle it is in contrast to the situation. I think having that contrast was necessary for the illustration to be more emphatic.