Inner Thoughts
Mural (Collaboration with Athena Leung)
2020
The Staircase Mural Project
While studying at OCAD University, I had the opportunity to make a collaborative mural project organized by Jon Todd. His goal was to beautify OCAD's graffitied stairwells and give students the chance to apply their illustration skills on a bigger scale. For this mural a fellow OCAD illustrator, Athena Leung, and I collaborated on a design to go along the stairs. We found the diagonal layout the most dynamic format to follow, and a good challenge to illustrate in a non-rectangular shape.
Specs: 144" x 88" angled staircase bannister. Design must be a floating image using 5 or less colours.
Collaboration and Creative Process
Our concept was to image the inner mind of an OCAD student. We wanted to create a tangled design with characters intertwined in-between, representing the thoughts and ideas in our heads. Though it looks chaotic and stressful, the mindset is fun and cheerful, shown through the colour palette.
After the ideation, I made a rough sketch of the intertwined 'noodles' to work as a base for our characters. Athena and I got together to create a unique set of characters that blended both of our styles. Everything was then moved to Photoshop to play around with how the characters would fit into the 'noodles'. A plan was made, leading to the final linear and colour compositions.
Find more of Athena's work: https://atleung.wixsite.com/pineapple
Rough design of the base
Athena's character sketches
My character sketches
Linear progress: Starting from a revised linear that was properly drawn to fit the specs, then adding the characters, and finally redrawing in ink for a clean final line.
Colour compositions
To be painted in 2020!