Rose Colored Glasses

For this comic, I was assigned a specific color to incorporate into the narrative, which for me was this murky, rosy color. I brainstormed some ideas that related to that color and my favorite was the phrase “rose-colored glasses,” which is a metaphor for having an optimistic view on life. I felt that could definitely be relevant for the COVID-19 chaos at hand, but it’s hard to pretend that everything is fine when so many people are dying, not to mention all those who are now unemployed and separated from their loved ones and such...

I also had a morbid thought that the only places that are really “busy” right now are the hospitals and the afterlife. So I decided to have the setting in this afterlife type of realm, with the plague doctor as a stand in for a grim reaper, collecting the souls of those who enter. My color is also a flowery color, so I tried to incorporate elements of spring into the comic. Spring is typically a season for birth and life, but the way things are with covid right now, it feels like the exact opposite. So I made it so that each flower is supposed to represent a soul transitioning from life to death. I used depictions of national flowers based on places who have had the most cases (ie: plum blossom= China, lily= Italy, rose= New York, but a lot of countries also have the rose as their emblem, violet= New Jersey, apple blossom= Michigan).

This was made using Adobe Photoshop.