What makes this study particularly meaningful in my process is how it was built. I created the image across four sheets of paper, pieced together to form a fragile, makeshift surface. The seams are visible; they hold the children and the bear within a space that could so easily come apart. That structural fragility became part of the message. The paper itself stands as a metaphor for childhood in the digital age, fractured, precarious, held together just enough to appear whole. The figures, like the medium, seem stable but are vulnerable to rupture, just as imagination and presence now rely on ever-thinner threads of attention in a world of screens.

Visually, this was the moment my line language began to crystallise. I moved away from the looseness of earlier sketches into something bolder, more graphic. Heavy black contours, deep shadows, and stripped-down forms began to replace detail. By removing context and background, I wanted to amplify the emotional void at the centre of the scene, to make silence visible. The black and white contrast was deliberate: an image of connection severed, of stillness heavy with absence.

The experiment was as much about material as meaning. After finishing the drawing, I cut it into a stencil and brought it to a wall, an act that extended my practice from the studio into the street. Seeing the image in that environment changed everything. The street introduced immediacy, unpredictability, and the possibility of dialogue. Watching strangers pause, look, and reflect was a powerful confirmation that the imagery resonated even beyond its initial context.

As a former school teacher, I had witnessed first-hand how imagination fades when play is replaced by screens. I had seen toys gather dust, and children’s attention drift into devices that promised connection but delivered isolation. This work grew from that tension. The two children, side by side yet alone, and the teddy bear left behind, capture that contradiction in the simplest of ways: together, but disconnected; surrounded, yet empty.

Looking back, I see this piece as a milestone. Though conceived as a studio experiment, it marked both a technical breakthrough, my adoption of stencilling as a core method, and a conceptual refinement of my mission: to raise awareness of how technology is reshaping childhood and mental well-being.

It also became the direct precursor to Swing of Silence, an important work with repercussion in Spain. In retrospect, this study feels like the crucible where everything converged, observation, material and purpose. It was here that I began to understand how fragility itself could be both subject and surface, how silence could speak louder than noise, and how art could quietly confront the cultural silence imposed by technology.