Collaboration project

During this week's class, we worked as a group on one project and then were assigned into pairs to work on a collaboration project. In the group project we needed to illustrate this text: 

‘You can see a face it is a mans face, grizzly and marked, his mouth is but a black slit and his hair a nest of dirty matted strands, his eyes are emerald green, piercing and shining, looking right at you, seeing into you…’

After all of us illustrated the text, our tutor put it all together in a GIF and here is the GIF my class has created:

The image I have created is the drawing done with the black colored pencil and and the eyes are bright emerald. 

 For the collaboration mini project we were paired in groups by our tutor and we had to think of a project that we can do together in a timeframe of a week. I was paired with Michel for my project and I was quite worried because as I have seen Michel's previous work, it is really good, but completely different than mine. Also Michel's progression route is graphic design and mine is animation so this is also totally different. 

Personally, I see myself as a team player and I am good at working in a group, although I almost always take the role of a leader in a group. My leadership skills are definitely highly developed and I know how to use them. It is a little bit different when we are working in pairs rather than in bigger groups, because a pair does not need a leader. 

I was worried about how we would come up with an idea we both would like, but it turned out to go really fast - much faster than I have expected. Michel had a few ideas and we both thought about making a movie poster. Michel noticed that I like creating characters, so he thought that I could create a character and he could do the typography. I thought it was generally a brilliant idea. Michel showed me what kind of work he was interested in doing and it was sort of graffiti kind of typography and I came up with an idea where the character would be like a skater boy with a spray paint can in his hand and we could put him against a brick wall which we would take from unsplash.com which is a website with copyright free images. We established that we want the whole image to be monochromatic - gray and the typography would have some color. 

This is where I started doing my part of the project. I have sent this rough sketch to Michel to ask what he thought of it. 

Michel really liked the sketch but he proposed that I add headphones to the character, which I thought was a really good idea. I have created two sketches, one with the headphones on the character's neck and one of the headphones on the character's head. 

Michel liked both of the sketches, I personally liked the one with the headphones on the character's neck more, because the headphones on the head did not really look natural. After making sure the sketch looks good, I have added color (different shades of gray). This is how my finished part looks like. 

I am really happy with this character drawing and Michel also agreed that it looks well. 

For the typography Michel came up with an idea to create a graffiti writing in Tag style, just the outline in blue/purple color. I really liked the idea. We also had to come up with an idea of what the text will say, which would be a movie title for this animation. We had a couple ideas, but we decided on just naming the character and making his name a movie title. After going through a lot of names, we both liked Sebastian, because it is a name is Spanish and it also exist in Polish and in Polish slang a Sebastian is kind of a young rebel, usually the nickname 'Seba' is used in a negative way to call someone rebellious but also aggressive. Sebastian in English sounds like a very sophisticated name, so I think it has some interesting irony of that rebellious world meeting that sophisticated environment. 

Michel started by doing a sketch on paper:

 

I really liked the sketch Michel created. I think it works well with the idea we came up with and when the outline is in color, it would look fantastic. 

Michel created his part in photoshop and this is the outcome. 

The background is transparent but I really liked how it looks on black, so for our poster I added black background for the text, so it is visible. The text needed plain background so it wouldn't mix with any other pattern from the back. 

I found a brick wall picture on unsplash.com which is a website with copyright free images and I have applied black and white filter on it, so the bricks would fit with the monochromatic idea. 

Michel put the the whole poster together in Photoshop and this is the final piece:

This is our finished piece and we are both very happy with it. I personally think that it looks fun and interesting and I like the real element (the brick wall) and the cartoon character. This sort of mix is something I mentioned in my research post about 'The Amazing World of Gumball' and I am glad I had a chance to create something in this manner for a mini project.