The life of the polar bears


I was inspired by the book "little polar bear" by Hans de Beer. This book is about friendship, working together and the environment.

This is a children's book based on the endangered polar bears.This continuous story is based on polar bears becoming endangered species. There are only 22000-31000 polar bears left in the world! I want to raise the attention of younger children to let them get a chance to get some knowledge about the real world and not everything is like a story with a happy ending. I was inspired by the news online to write a short story about the polar bears as in many articles have mentioned that due to climate change, the ice in the arctic is slowly melting and polar bears are now endangered. I want to raise awareness of this as the polar bears are suffering due to our actions and habits.

I chose the colours blue and white as the main colours of my book as i think that it would stand out the most and it would be obvious that it is about polar bears. I put in the colour blue as the main colour because the colour blue represents sadness because it is a dark toned colour which suggests emotions. The white in my book is to show the polar bears and their surroundings as ice is a white and clear colour and most importantly the polar bears itself.

Ryan and Bork's Adventure

When given the assignment I had my story all planned out. Originally it was a four and a half page in depth novel with vivid descriptions of each character and their backstories which gave me a strong connection to these fictional characters. The assignment, however, was to write a novelette for children so I was forced to dismiss the idea. 

The image that inspired me to write the story was one from Richard Mosse’s Pink is the Colour of War album photos. I first discovered Richard Mosse’s photography in December. His Infra-Red collection really interested me and inspired me to start taking pictures.

The images from his album reminded me of an alien planet which fitted perfectly with the idea of a child’s book since I had a genuine interest in space and different planets as a child. The colours seemed so vibrant yet natural it was as if the trees and the grass was grown naturally pink. 

I enjoyed writing the book mainly because of how amusing I found creating a children’s story. When thinking of stories my mind goes into detail with vivid imagery and descriptive language, so this was a different experience.  

Ryan's character is quite bland and almost oblivious but for a child's book I don't think a fully developed personality is necessary. Similarly with Bork's character I tried to add some humour through Bork's conversation and design. My thought behind the plot was to mix the beginning of E.T. and the mind game scene of Ender's Game. 

Kevin The Banana

The real-life story I based my children's book on:

The sequence starts with a banana duct taped to a wall. But it's not that simple. It's worth $120,000 and the wall it's stuck to is in Art Basel in Miami Beach, one of the three locations globally in the Art Basel chain which houses some of the world's most expensive modern art. The people who go there are looking to spend lots of money, and although it seems ridiculous, the art piece sold for $120,000. The artist, Maurizio Cattelan (who previously made mainstream news with a golden toilet, which was stolen from Blenheim Palace) named the piece 'Comedian'. This simple spectacle prompted a lot of debate and conversation, some arguing that it is self-aware of it's stupidity, hence the title, while others thought it was completely absurd to sell a piece of fruit for more than $100,000.

Personally, I think the whole thing is ridiculous, but interesting nonetheless. And the intrigue doesn't stop there. In my eyes, the real hero of the story is a man called David Datuna, a self-proclaimed performance artist who strode into the 'art fair' and waited patiently in the queue to see the infamous fruit. When it was his turn to see the banana, he confidently took it off the wall, started to peel it and ate it there and then. At a press conference, David said “I call the performance, ‘Hungry Artist,’ because I was hungry and I just ate it.” 




There has been so much news coverage of this chain of events, and the topic was a bit exhausted, but I wanted to tell the story from a different perspective. I thought it would be fun to write it from the banana's point of view. The story I wrote is fiction, but is still loosely based on the actual events. I personified the banana, gave it a face and called it Kevin.

I struggled with how I wanted the banana to look at first. I wasn't sure if I should give him legs, arms, ears or a nose. I wanted him to have a personality, but I was conscious of crossing the uncanny valley and making him look too human, which would be creepy. In the end, I decided to keep it simple and do the illustrations in a cartoon style with bright colours.

young people and the cycle of poverty

 

I got the inspiration for my book from a Banksy image of a small girl holding a balloon with the title “no hope“. I interpreted the image to represent children in poverty originally down to the imagery alone and after some research also by the location of the graffiti. It was created on a crumbling garden wall in Southampton and was painted over with white paint within a week of it being created. 

This art inspired me because of the powerful message it portrays, while still holding an air of simplicity also because I believe it to be a brilliant piece of artwork. I got the images inside my book from thinking of what would suit the pages content and either drawing that or researching the theme and looking at images related to it. 

 My book is different because it’s on a topic no one else wrote about, also because its written in the form of a spoken word piece / poetry.

 The theme I’m trying to express through my text and images is the cycle of poverty. How ridiculous and unjust it is that the amount of opportunities you get in life is based upon your parent's income, post code or your community's facilities. In my opinion all children should have the same opportunities in life.  

The reason I wrote this was to challenge the argument some make when talking about the cycle of poverty that anyone can go from “rags to riches”. I can see how that is an easy statement to make when you’ve been born into a nurturing stable environment. Although people are a lot less likely to make such a statement if they haven’t had the best facilities in life so far. For example if there secondary school didn’t offer a higher level Math's or Irish , they’ve had to take up job to help with bills which interfered with school studies, they’ve become homeless at a time and had nowhere to study without interference, or for a many multitude of reasons to do with one's economic status that effects education . 

My point is we do not have enough facilities for the youth of this country that’s living in poverty and we can not expect conditions to change until we fulfill those demands.