Love — Sabrina Busaidi

Let’s Talk About Love

The Client

True Story Tent

TST is a platform that supports and encourages the sharing of true personal stories from the Middle East.

@truestorytent

Valentine’s day was approaching so what better topic to talk about than Love! I was excited about this one because Love can be seen as a taboo/inappropriate or private subject matter to talk about in the Middle East. I was commissioned by True Story Tent to create an artwork that was going to be used as their social media poster, advertising their upcoming event.

February 2020

Deliverable: One 1080 x 1080 px or 1:1 artwork

Function: Events Poster

Uses: Social Media Advertising, Instagram Poster

Theme: Love

Client requirements: Artist has creative freedom, as long as the theme was reflected in final artwork.

Medium: Digital Art

Starting off the brainstorming process with putting down all the ideas that came up and writing and re-writing the word “love” in both English and Arabic as many times as possible to let the concept sink in.

I learnt so much doing the research for this project:

With each language that develops alongside a corresponding culture, it has its own set of words and symbols to describe love.
According to the ancient Greeks there are about 8 different types of love (not just the romantic kind)
According to the Arabic language there are 14 stages of (romantic) love.
I learnt about the five different ways in which we give and receive love i.e. our “Love Languages”

Finally I understood that modern day Valentine’s day is a day created by corporations to capitalize on one specific love language - the language of Giving and Receiving Gifts.

Sketches of a few of the different symbols for love from around the world

In the end I decided to create my own Valentine’s day wrapping paper, using the different symbols to create a pattern. After sharing my first draft with Abdullah he suggested to use an unorthodox color scheme to represent the taboo-ness of love and talking about love within the Middle Eastern communities by making it reminiscent of the neon lights you’d find outside of strip clubs. The contrast of the cutesy images with the color scheme was very much an honest albeit confusing representation of the way that we experienced the topic of love growing up.