Portrait of artist Kobby Toons
Design Indaba
Cape Town, South Africa
Ghanian artist Kobby Toons was selected by Design Indaba, to take part in our collaborative initiative with Google Arts & Culture, titled Colours of Africa. Africa is known for its bold, unapologetic use of colour. Stories are told in pigments, tones and hues; a kaleidoscope as diverse as the cultures and peoples of the continent. For the initiative, we asked 60 African creatives to capture the unique spirit of their country in a colour which represents home to them.
The projects they have created are personal and distinct stories of Africa, put into images, videos, texts and illustrations. Each artist has also attempted to articulate what being African means to their identity and view of the world.
- Title: Portrait of artist Kobby Toons
- What it Means to be African: Being an African means you have the privilege to be a guardian to the heart of the earth. It means that the forces that sustains the earth has been put under your care.
- Subject: Kobby Toons
- Rationale: Red is a colour that seems to be a bridge between feelings of negativity and that of the positive at the same time. It obviously could mean danger, hate, or pain, but could also mean love, passion, and sacrifice. With this in mind, I chose to go for a theme that best merges both negativity and positivity in one scenario, but drawing our minds toward Positive ways of relating to our social world. It works like the Yin and Yang which states that there’s a bit of evil in every good, and a bit of good in every evil. In every Love, there’s definitely danger, probably danger in the fear of losing the one you love. Also in Danger, there is love, What you do in a dangerous situation spells out the things or the people that matter to you the most, and this is what the theme is mainly based upon. The theme is “Love In Danger”. Because it is when you find yourself in the most dangerous situations that you realize those who really love you. No one enjoys the pain we go through when we lose someone we care about, and so, there’s always a reflex action when we see our lives drawing close to experiencing that pain. I believe knowing this fact and keeping it fresh in our minds would help us learn to cherish the people who really care and would do whatever it takes just to see us smile. These people do not need to think twice before they decide to keep us safe, neither should we think twice about cherishing them and keeping them around and happy as much as we can.
- Project: Colors of Africa
- Location: Ghana
- Lead Quote: Because it represents the blood of our ancestors, the sacrifice they made for love when our lives and freedom were endangered.
- Hex Code: E93F36
- Colour Choice: Love in Danger
- Biography: Kwabena Agyei-Agyemang, aka KobbyToons, is an illustrator based in Kumasi, Ghana. He is currently in his final year of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology. Agyei-Agyemang’s inspiration for illustrating comes from a childhood love for cartoons and comics and the ambition to bring his own imagination to life. He is currently focused on building his skill in animation, both 2D and 3D, and hopes to start an animation movement in Ghana. In 2021 he interned with LetiArts, a Game Development Company in Accra, Ghana. KobbyToons’ work was first exposed to a worldwide audience by YouTuber and tech-reviewer Marques Brownlee.
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