Sketchbook Work - Child Soldiers

These are a few pictures from my cop sketchbook. I have chosen the issue of child soldiers as a starting point and am trying to put the responsibility of the issue onto the viewer of the image. It's hard to actually do this, I started off by just drawing around the subject but realised I need to make the consumer feel a sense of guilt or ignorance for this to work. 

I thought about making the issue more local, for example using the iconic British soldier with bearskin hat but making them children. Maybe a British audience would care more about the issue of child soldiers if it was specifically relevant to their own country and family. 

I did the same with the poppy symbol too. Using a poppy bud rather than a fully opened flower suggests youth and innocence, it also gives the idea of a life being cut short. I played around with the image of a child's hand too but I feel this could be made more obvious. Showing the violence of war through the dying poppies in the hand of a child could give off a poignant message. 

After looking back at my soldiers image I realised the way I had drawn them makes them look like toys. I liked the idea of the playfulness of a child's mind combined with war which is a reality for some children. This is an illustrated game of hangman where instead of guessing the basic words that children learn early on, they are guessing the names of guns. 

I am going to continue with drawing around this issue but also need to move onto some other issues too. I particularly like the idea of making the issue local to someone to get a message across to them. It reminds me of an advert I saw a while back, I think it was about refugees. I will try to find it and post it to my blog as I feel it is really relevant.