Week 6 Stencil

My stencil for my sketchbook cover is going to be a gun with a flower blooming out of the barrel and a hummingbird drinking the juice from the gun flower. My stencil doesn't hold any particular meaning beyond the fact that it looks super cool and also that art is subjective so I like what I like, and I think my stencil will look really cool when I apply it to my book cover in class. I will say though that the hummingbird idea stemmed from mostly from the Aztec God of war Huitzilopochtli. Being a Chicano I resonate with my ancestral indigenous past and appreciate the pantheon of Gods, traditions, and imagery, and personally I think being a God of War is probably one of the coolest titles to have as a divine being. I like that the deity can both be about destruction and war but also present itself in a physical form as a very non threatening hummingbird. The gun idea came to me when I realized that I did not just want a single hummingbird on my notebook because I felt like it would be alone and that it would be very uncreative of me to just leave it at that. So I thought, “hmm what would my hummingbird on my cover need to accompany it?” then I thought, “ahh a flower.” but I didn't want to just put a regular flower so I wondered if there were any images of a gun with a flower blooming from it and to my excitement I found just that. I guess the gun also symbolizes war and killing but also defense, paired with the hummingbird they seem to have similar meanings that tie into the two images. From an artistic point of view I now appreciate stencils much more and plan on maybe customizing more of my journals, I'm really excited to see the final product next class..