30+ Brutally Honest Illustrations with Hidden Meanings

Hello there friends! We hope that you guys are keeping safe and are also enjoying our blogs and content ideas as well as the design mock-ups. Earlier this week when we were going through the comments section, we got to read a few really nice suggestions & requests and we just want you all to know that, that we will be sharing what you want us to share super soon. As of now, we have an artist and his brutally honest illustrations to introduce and share with you guys so, let us get started!

Elia Colombo is an Italian artist and is also know as gebelia (you can find him on Instagram with this username) and interestingly his Bio on Instagram reads: Comforting the disturbed and disturbing the comfortable. As you all know that we love to go through various artists’ portfolios and designs etc. that they have created for themselves, for their audiences or for their clients, Elia’s art had to become a part of our blog because we instantly felt overwhelmed and excited to see how he has depicted the society and other truths through his illustrations and we needed to share them with you too.

We all know that with the passage of time, technology has upped its game for almost everyone. Be it using a certain social media platform or the device that is being used to browse through that very social media platform. Anyone and everyone can access Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube etc. to create content and share it with their friends and followers. But what happens is that the content won’t always receive nice comments, at times people are so mean that they visit an unknown person’s profile only to say bad things under their photos and videos.

That literally happens almost everyday and although, it falls under the category of harassment and hate speech, multiple social media platforms are not smart enough to detect that and remove such comments. There are so many people around the world who may be comfortable in their own skin but they also feel like receiving validation and when that happens, they start getting influenced too – it is like an influencer falling under the influence of people they were creating the content in the first place.

A plus sized fashion blogger will keep thinking about the comment someone left on her Instagram mentioning that she is fat, a queer person will think things that might force them to take wrong decisions because someone reported them to their family after watching their video or stuff and so on and so forth. And in order to be feel validated, in order to feel more accepted and in order to stay safe for that matter, people do things that should not be done like they start eating less, they do not come out, they spend their life battling with themselves everyday where they have to hide their true self so that they do not get the hate from anyone.

The illustrations that Elia has created depict how people have accepted the fact that social media is the real world, it is not and we cannot stress that enough that we really need to differentiate between the real and the fake world as we like to call it. The fact that the world of digital and social media has made people live in illusions is sad and that made Elia work on this series of illustrations where he could show how it looks like when someone puts in a lot of energy and efforts to look exactly like the world wants to look at them. A person might not be happy with whatever would be happening in their life, but they will dress up, apply makeup on their faces and put up a smile standing outside a fancy café just for their followers (who probably do not even care) to let them know how happy they are.

By following toxic levels of being Instagrammy and Snapchatty, we are not only moving away from our true selves, but we are also directly & indirectly telling the people that it is okay to not accept how we were born. You could be anything and everything but if you want to be someone your followers that you don’t even know want you to be then you are never going to live your own life. Same goes with the rest of the practices that we have made ourselves comfortable with like not being there for our partner but being online 24/7 – submitting our souls to the technology or letting the society dictate us for our life choices and careers etc.

There are a number of illustrations on the ideas of how we ignore ourselves so that others can accept us or how we are ruining our relationships for social media apps or how the only book that we read these days is Facebook and we’d love to encourage you all to go through each one of Elia’s digital art pieces because we know you are going to love them.

Credit: Elia Colombo