Visual Project

Role: Designer, illustrator

This illustration is a visual experiment and a reinterpretation of the song “Into the Ocean” by Blue October. This song was a go-to for me when I was in my teen-years and I had always pictured a specific image in my head. Over a decade after the first time I heard this song, I chose to listen to the song with a fresh perspective and a blank slate, eliminating my initial ideas on what this picture could be. Ignoring my pre-existing bias and experiences, I started the reimagination of this image with the main character being a woman instead of a man. Suddenly, the story changed to be about a mother-daughter relationship. For the rest of the song, I stopped interpreting lyrics as metaphors and I painted this picture to a more literal understanding, utilizing the actual meaning of the words. The now woman/daughter was literally sinking to the bottom of the ocean, which in reality is a metaphor for stress, and the lyrics, “drifted into space” simultaneously transported her into an outer space experience. When the lyrics say “I thought of just your face” the image changed to be the daughter imagining her mother’s face as a way to save her and bring her back above water.

The illustration is made from cutouts of over a dozen photos. I used royalty-free images and Photoshop to create this photo-composite.

Software Used: Adobe Photoshop