Sneaky Raccoon - Workshop Week

Anna Mullin, most commonly known by Sneaky Raccoon came into the studio to hold a workshop, of which I took part.

Firstly Anna held a presentation describing herself and how this reflects her own practise and routes in terms of ethics when working with a client and in her freelance work also. I recently saw this talk at the Wilson’s Republic’s 2^nd creative meeting and so I will leave what I learned from the talk element for that post.

This was a flexible workshop based around the group’s aims and skillsets as to improve our knowledge and see how we can work within constraints that would be presented in a real work scenario. As the group had a mixture of graphic design and animation, Mullin set two briefs, one for graphics and the other targeted towards animation, though it was up to the individual to choose. I choose the brief aimed towards graphic design with this being my chosen field and this was based around using three colours alone to create a logo, typeface or poster design based upon what could be our favourite film for instance. Although we could only use three colours, different shades were allowed and so this is one way you could stretch the brief.

Initial Sketches

 I chose to create some designs based around my one of favourite TV series’ “The Walking Dead” and looked at how I could play with the theme of zombies. I decided to use semiotics to create a piece that would ideally display the abbreviation of the shows title, i.e. TWD as it is commonly known among its fans. Due to this being a mini brief to work around my studies, I chose to create the previously mentioned rather then working on a typeface for the full title.

R.I.P

Flat Shapes

In regards to the examples above, I felt the image looked a bit flat with having the one colour background and so I decided to create a further shape to distinguish an horizon and create depth within the piece.

Horizon Line

Further to this I created a dirt path as to distinguish and bring attention to the muddy footprints left behind. I experimented with having R.I.P. shown upon the grave"stone" as it were and decided to exclude this from the image as it distracted from the overall message of the piece. 

Final Design

I found this workshop helpful in regards to giving me the opportunity to both speak to Sneaky Raccoon about her practise, issues I find within my own practise and to learn important tips regarding perspective and vector illustration. To start off with I hadn't considered the viewpoint of the piece, I was considering the juxtaposition, but not the perspective and this is an important part of creating illustrations which are effective. Although not entirely accurate in regarding to perspective, I feel for the short amount of time I spent upon this piece I managed to improve it greatly.