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My final project “Map of the Soul” is a triptych art piece that explores the concept of our identities and delves deeper into the Jungian psychology idea that is the map of our souls. Each separate artwork focuses on a different concept that represents our identity as a person, the three themes are our persona, our shadow and our self. My project is a digital art piece, I created it using an iPad Pro, an apple pencil and the drawing program procreate. Creating this artwork, I incorporated the elements and principles of design in order to help me create an impactful and visually pleasing art piece.

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The elements and principles I used were colour, space, form, pattern, emphasis, balance and harmony. I showed form by using a variety of organic lines while drawing. Colour played as one of my most important elements. I used it to convey the contrast between themes while still being able to use a specific colour scheme to keep the whole artwork harmonious. I made use of space by using negative and positive space in my background and foreground in order to emphasize the focal point of my art. I used asymmetrical balance and patterns in my colours and motifs. This helped me in creating a unified and harmonious art piece, which was my indented purpose for the project, technicality wise.

My inspiration for my passion project was the psychology book “Map of the Soul” written by swiss psychiatrist and founding father of analytical psychology: Carl Gustav Jung”. Carl Jung’s theory states that every person is made up of three main pieces, these pieces are the ego, the personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious. All of these pieces work together in creating the map to our souls. I made this the inspiration behind my passion project because I found this concept very compelling, I wanted to learn more about this and be able to communicate and understand these ideas in my own way using art.

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The first drawing of my passion project is titled persona. It depicts a person holding shattering masks, each one showing a different emotion all while they themselves are missing a face. The main colour for this theme is orange, orange symbolizes superficiality.  The persona is described as part of the ego which is our unconscious mind. Our persona is the part of our personality that we display to others, it’s the mask that we have built that we present to the world. Often times our personas our the “fake” side of ourselves, they conceal who we truly are, we create personas to shield ourselves from the negativity in our lives. This art piece is made to show the confusion between choosing whom you want to be, while at the same time experiencing the loss of your true self.

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The second piece of my project is named shadow. This part portrays someone being held back by there shadow. Although in my art the shadow is shown as a literal shadow in order to portray the concept, the figurative meaning is that our shadow is the darker part of our psyche, it exists as part of our unconscious mind, its made up of our weaknesses, our repressed ideas, basically any negative part of ourselves. As much as we may try to avoid it, each one of us has a shadow that we battle with, the part of ourselves that is filled with envy, greed and hatred.

The final part of my artwork illustrates the third and final part of our map of the soul., the self. The self is the unification of our shadow and our persona. It’s the balance point where we can become our true selves. This is the reason why the elements of balance and unity played such an important roll in my artwork. For this final piece I illustrated someone surrounded by glowing colours, I used all the colours in my colour palette in order to symbolize the unity between the persona and shadow. As Carl Jung said, “People will do anything, no matter how absurd it is, to avoid facing their own souls”. Although the two previous themes had more negative connotations, I wanted this piece to give the feeling of relief and peace we feel after following the map that leads us to our souls.

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My goal for this artwork was to communicate a story and deeper meaning through my art. I want people to see this and think of their own interpretations and ideas as to the meaning behind it. Another more personal goal of mine was to close off this art course by creating an art piece that I was fully satisfied with. Often times I always felt mixed emotions towards my art, I always felt like I could’ve changed things and done things better. I chose digital art because after a few years of having my I pad I wanted to finally create a complete artwork utilizing all the techniques I had learnt. Overall, I feel happy with the end result of my passion project. I chose something I was interested in and had fun creating and learning more about these concepts. I managed to fulfill my technical goals, my artistic goals and my personal goals. I’m glad that taking this course helped me overcome my art block and allow me to once again regain my love for art. In the future, I look forward to implementing everything I learnt this year into my art.