“It’s not funny”-A jacket that deals with Coulrophobia

Initial sketch:

Color brainstorm:

Display：

When I was interviewing Ata, I found out the reason he felt great fear with clown was because his previous impressions of clowns from the movies. In all the clown movies he had watched, all  the clowns turnt out to be serial killers and psychopaths. Ata agreed on that his fear of the clown might actually be the fear of dark and evil forces in our society. However, Ata was not afraid of a lot of cartoon characters of clowns. He specified the two clowns he liked. They were Lego clown and the Krusty from the Simpsons. I majorly incorporated these two characters into the design of this jacket. I expected when Ata wear the jacket he will be free from thinking the scary clowns, but instead, the cute ones.  I displayed this ideas of two different types of clown in the drawing that’s on the hoodie also, with one side colorful cute clown face and one side darker coloring paints and a skull. As I got deeper and deeper understanding of Ata’s fear, I felt like the disgusted feeling he got from clown was actually his hatred to cruel acts happening around our society. It could be further linked his desire to make peace and justice out of the world. So, thinking of that, I added “Peace” and “正義”, which means justice in traditional Chinese, on the front of the shirt to incorporate with the drawings. I also put a saying from George Carlin stating “may the force of evil become confused on the way to your house” to give my best wish for Ata. The hoodie could be all zipped up. This is, in case, when Ata meets a clown and he becomes really scared of it, he can simply zip up the hoodie. As he said, he won’t be afraid of clown if he actually became one of them or he could not even see their ugly faces. The back of the jacket, I put a drawing of a boy with sharp eyes and serious face stating “it’s not funny”. This quote actually came from Ata. I put the line on the back meaning to scare the clowns away and show Ata’s attitude towards the clowns. There is also a painted line “sober” appeared on the back of the shirt to indicate that clown’s bad spirit cannot get into and mess with Ata’s minds.

 

Krusty from The Simpsons                                         “It’s not funny” quote from Ata