The picture that I have chosen to analyze is about the effects of global warming and the harm it does to our natural life. On Design Inspiration, The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) is talked about as an international non-governmental organization who aim at informing the public about the importance of keeping the environment healthy to protect our wildlife; and is said to be successful, being the largest independent conservation organization in the world. The WWF has about thirteen hundred projects, internationally, for their organization. This article claims that WWF has over five million supporters across the world, who work on these conservation and environmental projects. Most of the advertisements, if not all, that they publish are very influential and moving which make their campaign that much stronger (The Design Inspiration). Even though I myself am not an environmentalist, it makes me think deeper about not only the photo, but also the meaning behind all of the colors used to portray the image. By looking at colors and objects, we see that green can have the role of portraying sickness and yellow holding the meaning of caution, which tells us the artists wanted people to realize what they are doing to the world.

The first color that stood out to me was the overlying green. It’s not just green; it’s a dirty green with hints of yellow. Many people have claimed that this shade of green makes them think of sickness. Generally people say they think of nature when they think of green, in this case, all the nature is destroyed and it’s because of our sick ways of disposing waste. It is possible and highly likely that the artists used this color to portray that the people in this world have made the Earth sick. Sickness is something everyone wants to distance themselves from. Which I believe the artists are trying to depict; if we want to distance our own living bodies from ill health, why don't we do everything we can to protect our home and helpless other beings in our world from it? The green in this image has two, if not more, meanings. The first one I discussed is the more obvious and initial connection. The second I saw probably is not so easy for viewers to see. Another meaning green can have is greed, and although this may not be the shade of green people are referring to when they reference it to greed, the meaning was still meant to be involved in the image. Greed can be seen as a sickness. It is an addiction and no addiction is healthy. People are so concerned about their factories and oil companies that they don’t think about the long-term impact, and if they do they are simply being greedy because they want the money that comes out of it. Not only are they sick with greed, but also they are spreading a disease when they pump fumes or dump thick harmful waste into many living beings homes.  

Along with the green color, as I said before, are hints of yellow. The yellow isn’t bright or directly drawing the viewer's eye to it because the whole image has an overall dark look to grief the state our home is in. Although shades of colors play a large role into how people interpret them individually, it is equally important for the overall look of an image to combine color, even if not in the right shade, and context clues to work together to convey the same meaning as the different tints would. This yellow, in the image, isn’t bold, but it still holds its meaning. Yellow can mean betrayal. From what I see, that means we’re betraying ourselves. We’re ruining the only home we have, and as the title of the picture says, “nature can’t be recycled” (WWF). Another meaning for yellow is caution, which is pretty ironic because it’s cautioning us from ourselves, from our own betrayal. It could also be cautioning us about the long-term effects that I touched on before of our whole world being made of garbage.

The image provided above is an animal made of garbage, surrounded by garbage and the authors are trying to show, that is our future if we, as a whole, do not change. At my initial view of this illustration, my attention was directed at the harmful toxins in the air shown to me by the green color. The air pollution was fairly easy for the artists to draw and color to catch the eye of the viewer. As I dove deeper into the descriptive illustration, I recognized the yellow sewage pipe directly under the bird’s feet. The purpose of the yellow pipe is to draw the attention of the viewer to a new area of the photo rather than focusing on the sky and background of the photo. The artists made the large sewage pipe yellow in order to emphasize the caution we need to notice for water pollution. While the water that is being harmed is black, the object causing the harm was colored for alert.

Although I am not an active environmentalist, this advertisement, along with the others in the series, really made a point to me. That is an image creator’s job - to make someone who does not know much or is not very involved in the subject matter, care about what is going on and prove a point to them. The artist needs to be as informative as possible without making the viewer take much time to read into the background of the illustration, but rather having them clearly understand the message by seeing the objects and color work together. Overall, looking at colors and objects, we see that the artists used green to portray sickness and yellow to represent caution, which tells us they wanted people to realize how we are harming the world.
