And then we found out that Shepard Fairey was coming to town to create a mural in downtown Rock Hill! Fairey is a street artist, graphic designer, activist, illustrator, founder of OBEY clothing, and the creator of the Obama HOPE poster. He is also the grandson of Charles Davis, former Winthrop University President. A team within the College of Visual and Performing Arts (Jeff Bellantoni, Karen Derksen, Mikale Kwiatkowski, and Shaun Cassidy) had the idea for a student-created mural in honor of Fairey’s visit and his work. They approached the Illustration program to see if students might be interested. And so, the two project ideas came together as one.
So! My illustration students collaborated on a design, mostly using a white board to collate ideas. They each came up with rough sketches on their own, and then commiserated on which figures they wanted to pull together in the final mural. They came up with a color scheme inspired by Fairey’s Hope poster, which contains dark blue, light blue, red, and cream. Two accent colors were added, yellow and green, to reflect Fairey’s more recent works. We photographed the white board and turned it into a digital file in Adobe Illustrator where final tweaking was done. Then students broke into teams to work on the coloration. Once all the line work and coloration was complete, we pulled everything back together into one file to use as our guide.
Click the image to get a closer look.
The planning stage is always the most time consuming. This took four three-hour-long classes to pull this together. I was so proud of my kids - they worked so well together!
Check here to follow their progress!
Visit all of the mural posts:
Step 1
Step 2
Step 3
Step 4 - The Final!
#artswinthrop #designwinthrop
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