Heesun Shin
School of Visual Arts

Life of the Toothbrushes

Objective: One day, I was washing my face in my bathroom, which contains the usual bathroom stuffs, I suddenly noticed that the two toothbrushes in the holder looked like lovers. They were facing each other. They seemed to be whispering something sweet into each other’s bristles. I started playing with the toothbrushes, facing them toward each other allowing them to caress. They are ordinary objects, inanimate and dead in nature. However, I felt a living energy and movement from them. I drew them in Adobe® Illustrator® using the Pencil and Pen tools and gave them a life. I personified the toothbrushes as lovers. I transformed my ordinary daily objects, my toothbrushes, into persona. I created five different stories: The toothbrushes fall in love, have a misunderstanding, fight, reconcile, and love again, as humans often do. The shadows stand for allusions of their emotional states. The cross-etching pen technique expresses the complexity and density of human life. I believe still life object, despite their dead nature, have life. Each illustration is called the “Life of the Toothbrushes.”

Tools used: First of all, I imported my original pen drawings of toothbrushes into Adobe Photoshop® and placed them into Illustrator. I traced the outlines of shape and then deleted the placed drawings. I did the artwork in Illustrator. I primarily used a Pencil tool and a little bit of Pen tool to create cross-etching pen techniques. I wanted my illustrations to have a hand-drawn quality.

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