Final Project!!

INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT CLICK HERE

For my final project, I made an Instagram account about the topic of advertising. Instagram is a great social networking tool to communicate with many different people and I thought it would be great to use Instagram for my final project. For my drawing works, I decided to use the silhouette techniques and this technique is inspired by my favorite artist Kara Walker. For the posts, I cropped images from the internet, turned them into black using Photoshop, and cleaned the lines with Illustration tool. Then I changed the background colors. Most of my posts are from the Kilbourne’s readings and the movie Killing Us Softly. I believe that this project is for the women who are suffering from the advertisements and media idealizing women as objects and Photoshopped looks.

In my posts, I addressed the problems of advertisements in America and the representation of women shown in the advertisements. Women are depicted with unrealistically small waists and “sexy” hourglass figures, creating social mores that are impossible for women to fit into. Advertisements defile women’s bodies with the countless number of expectations. They fix the face and figures of women with Photoshop and because of that, the women in advertisements have no wrinkles, lines, blemishes, or scars. Lastly, I posted positive movements of advertisements that were mentioned by Kilbourne in “Killing Us Softly”.

For the positive movement, Kilbourne mentioned a law in her video. Starting from the France, six countries banned excessively skinny models walking on the runway. More good news is that US is one of the country that banned super-skinny models from the runway. The purpose of this law was to stop encouraging an unhealthy body image and eating disorders. 

Through this project, I hope to raise awareness of the importance of a woman’s love for herself despite all the narrow-minded advertisements. I hope that society will change their idea of an ideal woman and move to become accepting of all women across the globe.

Work Cited

1.    Kilbourne, Jean. Beauty And The Beast Of Advertising.

2.     TEDx Talks. The dangerous ways ads see women by Jean Kilbourne. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uy8yLaoWybk

3.     Openedmieyez. Killing Us Softly 4 Advertising's Image of Women. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnAY6S4_m5I

4.     Gee, Rachel, et al. “The Representation of Women in Ads Hasn't Improved in a Decade.” Marketing Week, 21 June 2017, www.marketingweek.com/2017/06/21/representation-women-ads. 

     Six countries taking steps to tackle super-skinny models. https://www.euronews.com/2017/09/06/counties-fighting-underweight-modelling