As close as a star to the moon

More from ArtWorks and more from me doing examples to hash things out as far as figuring out timetable, potential challenges, fixes, ect, this time with the trifold mailer layout. 

It also gave me the opportunity to take elements we didn't go with as a group and see what they would have been like taken to conclusion.

In Brightest Day, In Darkest Night

Making examples for class fulfills a number of purposes. It let's me know how much time the project could take, it let's me know what sort of challenges students might run into and how to fix them, it let's me know if what I'm asking is even reasonable to expect, and it let's me get some of the urge to control the process and the results out of my system. I don't need for their work to be my work because I already did my work, so their creations can be different and with pleasant surprises.

One of those pleasant surprises was the background to this image.

One of the students wanted to make something resembling the 2012 ArtPrize lantern launch. I helped her put together some of the elements and I think she had a very creative idea which turned out pretty awesome. Unfortunately it wasn't the direction the rest of the group wanted to go, opting instead for a more painterly approach. I still really liked it and hated to see it become a dead end, so I used it as the starting point for my examples.

Below is a version formatted for mass e-mail using one of the example logos I whipped up.

The orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us

One of the more difficult aspects of doing a collaborative group project with students is ceding some control of the results and at times even the process to allow the students to learn, to make and correct their own mistakes and ultimately let what gets created be their work and not your own. You want to guide the work, not dictate it. And that's really hard.

An area in our project I where I found this exceedingly difficult was in the lightbulb logo.

Partly it was because I didn't feel we had spent enough time on logo design, text and font design, or the overall importance of logos to branding and marketing. It felt as though the most important, iconic aspect of the work was being sidelined and we were proceeding into the final with a rough placeholder. Partly also it was that I felt going with the rough first draft as the final is fine, but only if it's after you've already tried and exhausted a bunch of other options and decided that the first was the best. 

To that end I wanted to present an alternative, not only to show that there were other options to consider and kickstart them to making some of their own, but also to show what could very easily be accomplished in Illustrator with vectors rather than trying to paint something in Photoshop.

Ultimately the students still wanted the rougher original, which was fine, but at least with these mock ups they could see some options. 

Exquisite Corpse

I'm doing a summer arts program for high school students called ArtWorks at the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art through Kendall College of Art and Design and it's pretty great. We had a little bit of extra time today after our guest speaker session and so we played the parlor game "Exquisite Corpse."
If you're not familiar with the game, the premise is that each player draws a section of the body unaware of what the other participants are creating. At the end you unfold the drawing to see the completed form.
I drew the top section and the bottom two thirds were a couple of the students.
Adorable!