Travel Home: A Story
If you're in Portland, you'll want to see this project.
Projects, like many things in life, start with one goal and twist into something different and usually surprising.
Travel Home: A Story asks questions that aim for the core of our philosophies, our memories and our dreams. It asks about home and growth.
It gave me a chance for growth.
Creating this poster began with a wonderful thumbnail from the lovely Lily Warpinski. A sketch that made my life, as a design, far far easier. I rendered her sketch into Illustrator, added some color and embellishments. She provided a font reference and I found something that fit the bill. Everything was easy.
She and her Director, Rafa, gave some notes which were simple to apply, and the poster was done.
Then life happened.
They needed to recast a role. There wasn't time for a new photo shoot with the new actor. The new poster might need to be used for applications beyond the original marketing campaign.
We didn't have to start over, but we did need to solve a pretty big problem: How do you make the characters show up on a page, in a photograph, but anonymize them?
How do you keep an identity without a face?
Normally, you'd just reach for an illustration and be done with it. Except that I can't draw. It's not in my skillset, I'm saving that for another lifetime.
In addition, Lily wanted to learn Photoshop. See, she's actually got the ability to sketch and draw and make the beautiful things in her mind visible for us on a page. All she needed was the tool to take that skill into the realm of digital design.
So we took a Saturday and set to work. Here's where my growth comes in. I found out that I could actually teach this software worth a damn. And that I love seeing how people get excited about new technology and finding out what it can do for them. I was also a bit spoiled, because my student picked things up faster than I ever did. Maybe a recalcitrant learner might change my happy tune about teaching.
Maybe I won't teach recalcitrant learners Photoshop.
More than just the exchange of knowledge, I was spoiled with the collaborative experience. Making a piece, taking notes, applying notes, well that's long and drawn out and it can be tiring. Working together, trying things, scrambling to a different view distance and trying again, that's a bit magical. You pull each other along when things get tiring, you switch roles when the program isn't quite doing what you'd like, and the fresh perspectives make the work so much better.