Collaborative | Reflecting

Yesterday we submitted our outcomes for the YCN BEAR brief. Although there were no major hiccups during our time working together, this collaborative project has given me a lot to think about.

POSITIVES OF COLLABORATIVE

• It was a chance to gain experience working with others across other creative disciplines, which was completely new to me

• We also had experience of submitting to a competition brief as a group

• You also may come to realise what your strengths are during group projects. I found that I'm good at idea generation and keeping myself organised, however being assertive and forward is where I fell short

CHALLENGES OF COLLABORATIVE

• A big challenge for me was relinquishing control of various aspects of a project. Within my own practice, as well as illustration in general, we have to assume many different roles, dealing with the creation of images and artwork, as well as design, layout, type, colour, and even motion at times.
Because of the versatile nature of illustration, I found it difficult to work only with drawing, and rely on others to deal with layout, etc. It involves a level of trust I guess, and you have to accept that those other jobs are out of your hands.

• I found that being assertive was a challenge for me. There were times where I would have done things differently, however because a certain job didn't belong to me I felt it wasn't my place to say anything. There's a fine line between assertion and being too headstrong, which is difficult as you want to get along with the group, but also be honest and point the work in the right direction.

• I found it difficult to make images in my usual way (with a naive, childish aesthetic) and because of this I think my tone of voice in the images I put forward was completely diluted. I think I was too worried about pleasing people and making images that would be liked by a wider audience/suitable for a commercial brief.

MY THOUGHTS

• Although this project brought a lot of new situations and I do feel I learned a fair bit, comparing our concepts at the beginning, as well the artist research I presented (Anorak Mag, Rob Hodgson, etc), I feel that our outcomes are completely different from these references.

I also didn't think I was that much of a control freak, but I really struggled with not having a hand in every part of a project in comparison to projects I do on my own. I don't think what I contributed was the strongest work I made, so I'm disappointed in that respect. But I suppose a positive is that we managed to submit on time and complete what we planned to do.