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.

What they drew at work today

Typically this blog is what I drew at work today (hence the name), but today, it's what they drew at work today. My students that is. Or former students I should say as they received their completion certificates today. 

Today was the last day of the ArtWorks Program at UICA and this is the final product they created.

It's a trifold pamphlet for The Green Light Project, an awareness campaign for youth homelessness and runaways. 

We had a real client who chose to participate with a bunch of high school students rather than going with their usual design firm. We went through multiple pitches, multiple critiques, numerous variations, and a slew of final tweaks until we arrived at a final product the students and the client were pleased with. 

Not all the creative choices were ones I would have made, but that's kind of the point and I couldn't be prouder of the group or the work they did.

So instead of my work, here's theirs.

Gleaming the Cosmic Cube

Another incident where I had to trace a student's digital composition for their Digital Arts comic page project because what they turned in was not going to work. Some kids just can't trace I guess.
Oddly his colors turned out looking really great- kind of like an homage to the poster to 'The Endless Summer," except he had no idea what that was.

It's not personal, it's just monkey business

I do a project with my Digital Arts class that's fairly straightforward- we create a comic book page and color it. Since most students aren't confident in their drawing skills and since it's not really a drawing class per se, I allow them to instead composite a bare minimum of three photographs into a picture to print out and trace to then be scanned and put in Multiply Mode for them to color as their page. Pretty simple.

Unless of course someone can't even trace.

This kid had what I thought was a pretty fun idea of a monkey standoff against a poacher in the jungle and he put it together on the computer pretty well, but when it came time to trace it as a pencil drawing, well..... he can't trace anything to save his life. Rather than leave him with a cruddy picture of a great idea I redid the tracing for him. This is his idea and his composition with my tracing.