In celebration of NTGD, The Art Room organizes a collaborative community art project and donates the final art piece to another local organization of their choice on the day of the event. For this project, The Art Room chose to curate and donate an art piece to The Linda McNatt Animal Care and Adoption Center, the City of Denton’s animal shelter. I aided The Art Room, remotely, by creating flyers and social media content to call on participation and spread awareness about the project and event. In addition, I designed and created the dedication poster that accompanies the final art piece.

As a visual arts major who has navigated and managed a mental health challenge, I was naturally and immediately interested in getting involved, not as a patron but as a volunteer. From February to May of 2023 I worked as an art volunteer at The Art Room once a week, maintaining the library of physical materials, such as charcoal, pastels, oils, and more, and demonstrating how to use them. In addition, I aimed to create a welcoming and relaxing environment and develop personable rapport with patrons. I was able to participate with them in the creative process and help patrons to feel secure and supported. I also assisted with the tasks of cleaning, checking in patrons, and answering the phone.

Immediately after graduating with my degree in Communication Design – User Experience Design from The University of North Texas (UNT) in May of 2023, I knew I wanted a larger role at The Art Room to provide greater support for the organization and gain practical, professional experience. While volunteering with Maryam Flory, a licensed professional counselor (LPC) and vice president/secretary of The Art Room, I expressed my interest. She was thrilled to learn about my aspirations and shared their plans for NTGD in September.

NTGD is very important to The Art Room as it provides a significant source of their funding. The Art Room organizes a collaborative community art project and gifts the final art piece to another local organization of their choice for the occasion. The purpose of this project is to gain more support for the non-profit and spread awareness around their message of achieving mental wellness through creativity. The most vital element of the project’s success is calling attention to the organization itself and encouraging the community’s participation in the event. Success hinges on maximum outreach efforts across multiple physical and virtual platforms, such as instagram, e-mail, flyers, and handouts. 

Maryam tasked me with outreach assistance to create a total of four promotional social media posts for instagram (one post per week), two flyers (one flyer calling for project participation and one flyer calling for donations on the day of NTGD), and a 16.54” x 23.39” dedication poster explaining the art piece itself. I collaborated and fulfilled each of these tasks remotely, via text message, e-mail, google drive, and zoom, having relocated from Texas to Michigan following graduation.

The focal point of the flyer is the largest card in the center, which holds the headline, the subhead, and the project synopsis. The secondary cards are similar in visual weight and they hold participation details, including kit pick-up location, submission start/end date, studio hours, address, and a QR code in the shape of a paw print for detailed instruction. The last card holding content is the smallest, bottom most in the upper right hand corner and states the organization’s name, “The Art Room,” the title of the project, Welcome Home, and name of the occasion, “North Texas Giving Day.” 

The foreground of the flyer is of a few clearly pronounced cards brought to our attention by a hand from a person’s point of view. By enlarging a few cards and placing them in front of the background, one perceives selecting a card while also creating a hierarchy of information as they frame the content. Sharing the focal point with the hand holding up a card is a pet paw resting on the other side. The paw balances the weight of the hand and signifies the recipient of the finished piece, The Linda McNatt Animal Care and Adoption Center. The paw is suggestive of a pet pawing for attention and connection. In all, it took about 60 hours from concept to complete.

I viewed these instagram posts as creative liberty opportunities to experiment with different tools and concepts in a quick time frame. For my first post I chose purple paint as the theme. The inspiration behind the purple paint concept derived from a recent type manipulation technique I wished to test and challenged myself on how to incorporate this technique with the art direction from the first flyer. Through illustrator, I experimented with creating freehand shapes to depict paint dripping down an artist trading card in various values of purple. In addition, I manipulated the ascender and descender lines of text to reflect the shape of the dribbles, implying the headline text is imposed by the dripping paint. To fill in negative space on the artist trading card, I included line drawings of pets to reinforce the partnership between The Art Room and the animal shelter and offer variety within the composition. The card is followed by a caption on the bottom right corner with details.

Another week I used a cyan color to probe a computer-generated space as the theme in an effort to experiment with space and perception. The reasoning behind this theme was derived  from my first post; I wished to implement the reverse visual treatment upon the elements to heighten interest. Through Photoshop, I distorted the cards and aligned them along an invisible angled grid suggesting the cards are exiting out of the frame and entering an infinite expansion out of view. In addition, the cards’ glowing edges provide a variation in their treatment and suggest a boundless y-axis as the cards float in a limitless, virtual, ominous space. The heavy, san-serif typeface laying across the card reinforces the cards’ distorted perception and offers a cold, hard, and lifeless interpretation. This digitized medium for this post was a personal addition to the overarching vision of the series because it’s conflicting with the art project’s physical, bountiful materials and I often work and am most familiar with computer-generated creative environments.

Lastly, in a strong effort to explore diverse concepts and techniques, I wished to create an animation for another instagram post rather than another still image. For this concept, I took inspiration from my new location in West Michigan, where I was deeply entranced by the Dutch influence in Holland and reminded of iconic Dutch artists like Vincent van Gogh. I imagined a clever, art-related concept and recreated van Gogh’s Bedroom in Arles piece in monochromatic yellow. The monochromatic yellow unifies with the leading art direction from prior pieces however it does not explicitly depict an artist trading card because the content is the card itself. I chose this artwork specifically because the subject matter of the painting is of the artist’s bedroom and the titled collaborative art project is Welcome Home. To amplify this connection, I used van Gogh’s name as a pun in the headline to reference the original artist and offer a playful observation. In ProCreate I began by recreating the painting with a textured tool as the base then utilized the animation assist feature to free-hand influence each frame to include each letter of type.

The concept for the flyer was to create a window to The Art Room as accurately as possible while also conveying it as a welcoming environment. The Art Room studio is the sole headquarters of the organization and most of the funding the organization receives goes towards sustaining and maintaining the studio space and ensuring a variety of materials are in stock. In addition, the studio is the greatest contribution/gift from the organization to the community because the studio is accessible to everyone who wishes to utilize it.

The flyer was to act as a mythical mirror that grants the viewer the ability to see the studio space, intended for their use, from any other location. To visually communicate the concept of the flyer acting as an enchanted window to the studio, I created depth within the composition by applying the one-point perspective drawing technique in ProCreate and allowing it to dictate the entire space. To expand on the composition’s depth and perspective, I applied a three-color gradient to the walls, floor, and ceiling (background) in which the gradients on the ceiling, floor, and each wall were treated individually instead of uniformly. By treating the ceiling, floor, and each wall individually, it defines the studio parameters of each divider and reiterates the visual depth.

To obtain accuracy and realism of the actual studio, I used real pictures of the studio’s interior to draw out each detail onto the flyer allowing the viewers to imagine themselves in the space. I kept the art style of the flyer similar to the previous promotional materials to express the connectivity between them all.