"Condoms (Don't) Always Work" was a somewhat unexpected outcome to an assignment in my Editorial Illustration class. And I mean unexpected because it would never have actually gotten beyond a tiny doodle in my sketchbook had my teacher and classmates not pointed it out.
We had an assignment to pick an article that had to do with a current social issue and come up with an illustration to accompany it. I started by choosing a few social issues that were important to me: LGBTQ+ inequality, objectification of women, and cloning to name a few. I came up with roughly 5 ideas for each. They were all pretty generic in that they could really be used with a wide range of articles for each issue.
In the corner of one of my pages of thumbnails, I absentmindedly doodled a little image that could potentially work for a 4th issue: the effectiveness of birth control. Being a woman, birth control (and of course its effectiveness) is pretty important to me. Yet, I didn't really focus on it beyond that silly little doodle. It mainly served as providing me a small chuckle and then it was back to LGBTQ+...
I went to class and had my classmates look at what I had come up with. I explained each of my thumbnails, only absentmindedly pointing at my condom doodle with a giggle.
But, my teacher pointed it out and asked me to explain it further. I told them my line of thought. You put a condom on to prevent sperm from passing to a woman, right? Well, it would be nice if it always worked, but sometimes for one reason or another, a condom breaks and out comes the sperm. And it B-lines to the lady's egg, which leads to a baby. So sperm = baby. Yes, only one sperm actually makes a baby but each one has the potential to lead to a baby. So, sperm = baby. That is like saying that you have got a billion little potential babies packed into that condom and if it breaks, out comes Jr. with a pop!
When I did, the half-asleep class got lively and gave me a resounding "that one!".
So, I scrapped all my other more thought-out ideas and began to just play with my silly condom idea.
And it was oh so fun!
Nothing like smoothing a ton of little baby drawings into a condom.
And there you have it! I also did a little mock-up of what it might look like in a New York Times layout. I took some pointers from the way an illustration by Keith Negley was placed in an article.
The article the illustration was meant to go with can be found here: Chicago Tribune article: Women overestimate effectiveness of Pill, condoms
After showing my final piece to my class, my teacher made a comment on how it was great but that it looked like a banana. So, the technicolor condom babies were born! Pick a color, any color...
Needless to say, this one was loads of fun!
Later in my time at SCAD, some of my illustration professors decided that this illustration would go into the illustrations department's annual publication. They also submitted it to the Applied Arts Student competition where it was a finalist.
