3 Penny: Reflections

The 3 Penny project represented a chance to incorporate a new element into our design process: collaboration. At first I was a little skeptical, but ultimately I was able to incorporate my artist's style pretty easily into my own ideas.

Partly I think this was easy because the two (my original idea and my artist's style) were pretty compatible. But also I think it's easy to accomplish this sort of meshing when you stop and think about how many different elements there are to something like an artist's work or a set designer's scenery. Ultimately, I designed the set exactly the way I wanted to and just used my artist's painting style to "color in the lines." Even if my original idea had been very different than it was, this method probably would have still worked. (Maybe not as well, but I'm sure it would have been possible.) You can look at an artist's color palate, medium of choice, message or theme, or a million other things. After hearing my classmates present and discuss how they fused their ideas with those of their chosen artist, I realized we all just picked the element which was most beneficial to us. I was most interested in making a basic, 2D, painted set- so I chose my artist's style of brushstrokes to fill in the blanks. Dan chose his artist's medium (collage) and color palate to give his own original ideas the desired "flavor" of the collaborator.

Of course, that's not to say that it's completely easy to just slap any two things together and have it work well. Careful thought must be given to the important elements, and ultimately the final design should make sense and hopefully be coherent. Also, it would probably have been easy to be overtaken by the artist's style if we hadn't come up with our own ideas first. This provided a strong base to start with. Again, looking at my classmates' work, I think we all built the structure ourselves and used our artist to paint it. In my case that's literally how I formed the model, but I think the analogy works well in general. In fact, the order doesn't really matter either. I think Mia, for example, used her artist to create the structure and then painted that structure with her own brush.

When working in different media with a lot of complexity, it isn't hard to find elements even from two very different bodies of work and mix them together in a coherent (and ultimately more interesting) way.