For this piece I based my work off of this line of poetry from Maya Angelou's "Still I Rise".

The line is as follows:

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I’ll rise.

I thought this line was relevant to todays events of protests inspired by racism, so I wanted to create a piece that was in a sense uncomfortable but representative some of the realities POC face. While this piece is on the extreme end of things it is not completely unrealistic.

I based my creation off of this piece, I really love the shirt with the phrase "people of color" crossed out and the word "BLACK" written in bold below it. Overall I really like the style and expression of the guy the photo is focused on, so I thought he would be a good model for the piece I had in mind.

I took the image and placed it in procreate where I was able to easily trace the outline of the image and then add fine details with the pen tool. I then used the black burn drawing brush on procreate to add in colors, but I left his shirt blank.

At this point is where the creation became a work of imagination and not a drawn recreation of a real image. I took this photo of an XD 4" Service Model Handgun and added it to the left side of the image through the same process as I did for the original image, except I used a pencil tool to give the metal a more scratchy look. I also needed to add in a hand to be holding the gun, but I did that by memory. This is what my piece looked like at that point:

At this point I was very happy with the piece, but wanted to add in something to fill the blank space as well as hint at police brutality, since that is what originally triggered the protests in May. So I decided to add a back ground color, which is red and blue streaks, slightly blended. I chose these colors because they are the same colors that the police use on their cars.

Here is the final piece: