Exquisite Corpse Collaboration

     For the second assignment of the semester, we were tasked with a collaboration project. We were given two large pieces of paper, with a few simple rules: stay out of the middle, work edge to edge, and create a creature of some sort. I had never done a collaborative piece before so this was new for me. For each piece of paper we had to separate it into four sections, each getting to work on every other section. This made collaborating a lot easier, and more time efficient. 

     I started first on the brown paper. It took me a while to get some ideas rolling in my head (per usual), but once I got the ball rolling, the project started coming natural. I started my first panel off by doing an evil joker/ jack in the box head. I was really trying to think of ways to work edge to edge in each of my panels, yet stay out of the middle. I started with the jack in the box head, because I wanted to be able to use the spring of the "Jack" in my third panel, as a way so work edge to edge and to move the eye around. However, I was not aware at first that with this project you couldn't plan too much ahead, because you had to go somewhat off of what your partner was doing in the panel above. In the end it ended up working out, and I got to include the spring in a way that enhanced my partner's work as well. I actually enjoyed working on the brown paper more, in comparison to the white. Since it was a darker color than normal, I feel that it pushed me to go even darker, allowing me to go back in later with highlights to really pop. 

Starting 1st Panel of brown paper

Brown paper piece right before critique

Final brown paper piece after critique

On the white paper, I continued off of the ground Victoria had created in the first panel, to lead into my demon head in the second panel. I stuck more to the theme of creepy and evil imagery, which I really enjoy illustrating. I was struggling at first to "be weird" and come up with weird and unusual imagery, like what I saw people working on around me. Finally I was like, okay I need to get something down, so I started down the road of creepy/ scary, since I was already ready for Halloween at the beginning of September. I'm glad I discovered what I enjoy creating through this process, knowing I don't always have to try to make my mind think like everyone else's. Being that the demon head was very far off to the right, I knew instantly that I needed something just as awesome to carry as much weight throughout the rest of my panel. Going back to my Halloween creepy thoughts, I knew that a wing would be perfect, and that ink would give me an awesome way to fill it in. I tried a few different techniques to get the texture on the wing. I tried aluminum foil, sponge, wet paper towel, and dry paper towel. I found that wet paper towel gave me what I was searching for, and played around with thinning out my ink until I finally got the right level of darkness. The very last panel on this piece was pretty difficult for me. It was my very last panel to complete and my mind was just mush at this point. I wanted to work off of what my partner had created, but nothing was coming to mind about what to do with the maggot/bug things. I think I was also a little stumped with the final panel, because the one above it was pretty blank, so I didn't have much of an idea to build off of. Finally I just decided that maggots coming out of brains made sense for the time being, and that one of them hatched and had wings. 

Sketching out 2nd Panel of white paper

White paper piece before critique 

Final white paper piece after critique 

     For both pieces I used charcoal pencil for the most part, which was not my original plan, but I got hooked after remembering how much I love using them to shade and create tedious designs. For the parts of the pieces that I wanted really black and dark, I would go in with sharpie first so it would be nice and precise, and then I'd go over that with my charcoal pencil, to give the black of the sharpie more warmth to accentuate the rest of the charcoal. Interestingly enough I did not use a trace of white in any of my panels until I was completely finished with the black. I really enjoy creating natural highlights by using the bare paper ( s/o the ballpoint pen project) and see it as kind of a challenge to see how lightly can I make my pencil go before it's just a pure paper highlight. However, with all of that being said, I did see later on that I needed to go back in with some actual white highlights just to make everything go up a notch. For my medium light highlights I stuck to a white charcoal pencil, because it tended to get more murky, and for my pure white highlights, I used a white acrylic paint pen (my new fav thing) which creates whites so bright that it looks as if Jesus came down and blessed your page. 

     

     After the critique it became very aware to me that my partner and I needed to fill in the background somehow, to eliminate how much empty space was still open. This was probably one of my hardest challenges. I have always struggled with backgrounds, in the sense that I tend to leave them as an after thought, instead of working on the whole composition at once.  I think the background also was somewhat of a struggle for me because I wanted our final piece to be somewhat cohesive, so I really wasn't sure whether or not to add background in on my two panels, although the others were blank, making it very obvious where the sections were broken up. It's crazy how much a difference a little bit of noise in the background can make, because now I think both of the pieces Victoria and I created look complete now, and I'm super pleased with how they turned out. Although I've never done anything like this assignment before, I think it was a really good experience that everyone should try once,  because in the real world you have to collaborate with people, and have to be able to build off of other's ideas.