After the briefing for Peter and Paul, I spoke to Sarah and we decided to collaborate together on the brief as we both were really excited to produce a mural or large design on a giant wall space! We also loved the fact that the brief was really open, so it meant that we could go a bit crazy with our ideas and do whatever we wanted!
We both thought that our idea should incorporate the water fountain, as we didn't like the way the fountain currently looked and thought that we could make it more exciting and blend into the surroundings better!
We decided to turn the water fountain into an Italian Renaissance water fountain:
Going from there we discussed how we could turn that whole area into a Renaissance corner. We thought about typical Italian things, and then thought about grapes and grapevines that could creep up the wall. Then I thought - why not turn the grapevines into typography? As we both really enjoy drawing type, so this would be a really good way of using our strengths together to collaborate fully!
We started off with a few dodgy sketches to get more of a feel of how vines could work with typography.
This slowly developed into the words "Welcome To Graphic Design", which we both took turns in sketching out on top of one another's sketches.
These sketches were traced over continuously in order to get better shapes within the letterforms and to work out how everything would interlink as naturally as possible, in order to look like a grapevine is wrapping around itself to create the letters.
Sarah sketches out a few different bits and bobs so we could discuss how the vine would work as a tree and how the leaves and fountain would work.
Meanwhile I was tracing over more and more typography to get it as close to perfect as we could before we took it into Illustrator.
We then thought about how the typography would intertwine with the vines and branches of the tree as a whole. We also decided to work out how the fountain would fit into this design.
For the other wall space, we decided to go with the idea of making it seem like you were looking at an animal conservatory and the designers were animals inside. We thought that this idea could link in with the renaissance water fountain downstairs by creating our very own Roman Zoo upstairs, so all the design styles would be very typical of Renaissance design, that way the designs would interlink and be similar to one another.
We then took the design into Illustrator to vectorise it. Because vectorising things like this is completely out of my comfort zone, Sarah took me under her wing and did all the complex stuff whilst I tried to make leaves, grapes and mosaics.
Although I didn't do much else of the vectorising for the project, I did have a lot of say as to how Sarah tackled other parts of the design and gave her constant feedback in order to make sure that I was still collaborating on the brief with her.
We didn't manage to finish the design fully, so I think I'm going to go back to the project after we've finished in May so that I can improve upon what Sarah has produced, as I've learnt so much more about Illustrator from watch Sarah working on parts of the brief. I'd like to change the design slightly to perfect it and make it more of a portfolio piece for my website, as I don't feel as though it is quite there yet.
We presented our idea to Peter and Paul, but unfortunately we didn't win as they felt as though our ideas were a little bit too crazy and didn't really suit everyone's tastes.
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Jessica Hische
As Jessica Hische is a huge inspiration to both Sarah and me, I thought that we should have a look into her lettering and see how she tackles typography that flows together or incorporates plant life.
Having a look at Jessica Hische's typography was definitely really worth while and gave us both loads of different ideas as to how we should tackle our typography for the brief. It helped to see how we coud incorporate leaves and ornaments to our lettering, as neither of us have produced lettering that is quite so heavily illustrated before. Looking at lettering like the ribbons type she created also helped with understanding looping letters to create shadows etc.
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