My supervisor and my co-worker Jonalyn gave me a task to create a graphic to teach kids how to make a bun. I started this task by doing research on how other people make tutorial graphics on Instagram. For a while, I was having trouble deciding what I wanted to do for the color scheme and I decided to go with yellow and green. I wanted to make this a fun carasoul for an instagram post and I started off drawing a girl for the post. On the next slide, I listed out the items people would need in order to figure out how to tie a bun and I wanted to create little illustrations next to the list. And for the next slide, I wanted to create steps that people can follow alongside illustrations.
I showed the process of my work to my supervisor and she really likes it so far. She told me to make sure to focus on diversity and different items of hair. I agreed with hair and made sure to do that to show her during the next meeting.
During September 27th, I had a discussion with my supervisor Alison and she thought it would be for the best that I work closely with the PR & Social Media Marketing team. She introduced me to two people called Jonalyn and Kimberly through email. Kimberly never replied so I started working closely with Jonalyn who focuses on creating videos for social media. Jonalyn and I scheduled to have a Zoom meeting around October 7th, where we can properly introduce ourselves to each other and figure out what I can help with in terms of social media. After both my supervisor and Jonalyn took a look at my resume, they both thought that my illustration skills were really strong and believed I could help create cartoons for social media. I agreed that I feel comfortable enough to illustrate cartoons for them and we began planning.
Three ideas were brought up during the discussion through email. The Brooklyn Nutcracker was the major focus in the next 8 weeks which is a culturally diverse performance during December that features the use ballet, hip-hop and many other dances in the world. They believed that I should focus on illustrating the elements that are unique to the BB Nutcracker and the diverse cultures that it highlights. Jonalyn mentions that she has been focusing a lot on how we can produce more video content for video utilizing some of the archive material (stills and videos) to promote the Brooklyn Nutcracker. Jonalyn also mentioned that something that a lot of parents of the kids have been struggling with making a bun for their students. She believed it would be helpful for parents if I could create some kind of a graphic for them that could be used on social. She even sent me a YouTube video of what she expects the graphic to look like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yG7Hcozrf8&authuser=0.
In another email, Jonalyn sent me the archive assets for Brooklyn Ballet which shows a lot of previous photographs of the Brooklyn Nutcracker. I used a lot of the photographs from the archives as a reference for my sketches. I sketched out some drawings and started coloring in Adobe Illustrator.
I attended an event hosted by the International Center of Photography called ICP Talks: Guadalupe Rosales hosted by Jackie Donaldson Bailey. The networking event is a presentation and interview about who Guadalupe Rosales is. I learned that Rosales lives and works in Los Angeles California and is a multi-disciplinary artist, archivist, and educator. She is best known for her community-generated archival projects of vernacular photographs. There was a Q&A at the end of the presentation but I didn’t get the chance to ask any questions due to there being a lot of people. At the end of the presentation, there was also a follow-up email thanking people for coming and asking us to take a survey about what we thought about the presentation. I thought that the presentation was interesting and a great learning experience. I thought it was interesting that she works with a vast amount of media such as sculptures, sound, video, drawing, photography, and community-based projects and archives them as a collection to share underrepresented experiences with the world. I connected to Rosales on LinkedIn.
