"Beautiful"

This is my latest piece for my acrylic painting class. You have to guess what it means before I tell you what I think it means.

K, this is what the painting means to me: If you enlarge the image you can see that it is painted on a dictionary page with the word "beautiful" on it. The word beautiful is on her shirt, where her heart would be. So, this perfectly lovely girl is cutting off her love-handles to conform with what the media tells her is beautiful. She is willing to harm herself and cut into herself to get to that. I think it's sad that the media convinces gorgeous women that they are not quite perfect, that they need to harm themselves to become perfect. I wanted this picture to show how sad that is that many girls and women feel the way this girl feels.

And this is one of my first digitally-made art pieces. It had to depict the words of a fortune from a fortune cookie. I definitely prefer to draw and paint by hand than digitally but it's a good thing to learn.