COLLABORATION PROJECT.

We recently had a short collaboration project to work on over the space of two days. I got paired up with another girl, Tocha, in my class that I hadn't worked with before and together we got given the word 'revolution' to work with. At first I found it quite hard since I wasn't too keen on the actual word itself, plus not knowing how well we would work together. 

What I liked about the workshop was that the brief was completely open to us so we could be as out there as we wanted with our ideas. I found working with another person quite liberating since we could both share thoughts that perhaps I wouldn't have thought of just working on my own. It allowed me to view things with a different perspective and experiment in other ways. To start generating ideas for our project we decided to look into the word revolution, using its literal meaning. We also looked at various works of art that had been inspired by real revolutions and noticed that it was all very symbolic, a lot of hand symbols were used. 

We decided to break down the word revolution into 3 stages; the revolution, the war and then peace. Then each stage would be represented by a certain symbol. We chose to use hand symbols at first since they are universally recognised. Tocha drew the hand symbols and together we came up with a fist for revolution, a pistol for war and then the 'peace' sign for peace. After looking at the images we thought it would be good if we could simplify the symbols further down so it could be used as a child's book. I drew up various symbols but we decided on: 

• Angry red face: Revolution
• Purple crying face: War
• Happy blue face: Peace

I kept the drawings very basic and we chose the red/purple/blue colour scheme so it would reinforce our drawings. This was the same for the hand symbols Tocha drew earlier as well. We made miniature mock ups of books using our work and then scanned everything in to InDesign. We chose to play with scale so made the child's book A8 in size and the hand symbol A2. The only problem we faced during the workshop was that the printers decided to not work when we sent our work over! It was really frustrating but we used our mockups for the final presentation and kept our InDesign open so people could see how we had laid the images out in a book format. 

Overall I really enjoyed working with someone else and I'd definitely consider doing a collaboration again. What I enjoyed most was how much quicker you could generate ideas together and being able to work out how to make both your styles work together visually.