With everyone stuck at home and dozens of countries around the world mandating a stay at home policy for their citizens, all of humanity suddenly has one more thing in common. While stuck in this quarantine, some people lose motivation, get bored, or lounge around, others focus on hobbies or introspection. Still others focus on preserving and appreciating what they had access to before the quarantine, and work to digitize it for all the internet to see. In the gallery are digital artist renditions of each of these activities: @kanekoshake focuses on the relaxing and boring part of quarantined life with their vivid and relatable illustrations, @stephaniepriscilla focus on the downtime that quarantine has given us not only to focus on hobbies but also ourselves, and @8pxl_ digitizes landscapes that we have long taken for granted, so that we may appreciate them more.
Kanekoshake’s art is often times more stylized and fantastical than it is realistic, but the cartoon-like drawings nevertheless elicit a sense of relatability between the observer and those featured in their art. Whether it be lounging around on your bed waiting for the day to pass, working online with a sibling or child bothering you, or just relaxing with your family on the couch, the use of vivid colors and bubbly features draws attention to every little detail included in each picture. The use of calming colors like blues, grays and warm browns works to relax the observer, tuning them into the same mindset as the people featured in the above artworks.
Where Kanekoshake’s art is more stylized, Stephaniepriscilla focuses more on a realistic side of art, in both her renditions of people, and the situations around them. From left to right, the art pieces increasingly become introspective. In the first image, similar to kanekoshake’s the warm colors and relatable situation draws us to connect with the subject of the piece. The second piece draws more distinctive contrasts with it’s clashing red and blue color scheme, drawing attention mainly to the girl pictured, but also the item in her arms, and her explored hobby of the guitar. The facemask and this exploration allows the observer to relate to their possible hobby exploration during this time where facemasks are increasingly mandatory. Finally, the picture on the right has a mostly gray tone, with low focus on the background, and the main focus of the piece being on a realistic representation of a person, and their artistic counterpart, illustrating the introspection that occurs when we forget about the things around us.
Furthermore, as each piece progresses from left to right, the subject of the piece turns more and more toward the observer, first from facing away, then to a side glance, then to a full look. And as more detail is focused on the person, they become more and more realistic, until the last picture is a blend of reality and fantasy; a personification of a human’s creativity.
Finally, 8pxl_ focuses on appreciation of the nature that we have missed out on all around us. Especially in the United States, and even moreso in California, where beaches and national parks are closed for safety concerns, these views become increasingly restricted for average citizens. Despite these limitations, artists like 8pxl_ try to preserve just a small piece of those views for everyone to enjoy what we have taken for granted. The use of radical colors for these color schemes, such as red/purple or blue/yellow only serves to highlight the mystical-ness of the world that many of us have missed out on, and are now restricted from.
Derek Zhang's Blog 