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Imagine you are working in a group writing a picture book. You are going to have to make a lot of decisions about this book and it is one of the biggest projects you will ever have to do this entire year. You and your group members have different drawing styles; however, you all want the book to be consistent with its style! You really want a good grade on this assignment because it is the biggest grade you will ever get and it's a grade for two classes! You and your groupmates don't know what to do. What are you going to do if you can’t get past this simple decision? How are you going to work together and get this done? You may be wondering why I want you to imagine this. I wanted you to because I was in this exact situation. However, I did come up with a solution. This year in 7th grade, I grew the most in my ability to collaborate well with my group members on a project.
The first image (pictured above left) is from the Storybook Project which is a project that was for Wellness and Fitness and English Language Arts. The goal of the Storybook Project was to teach younger kids about wellness topics such as conflict resolution (I used that as an example because that is what our book was about). In the end, we would create a storybook (also called a picture book) and send it off to a place where younger children might want to read these books to solve our problem. Camden, Juliana (or Juli), and I all worked on this project together as partners. This is my very first draft of the first page. It has a fox. It was made using the shape tool (the shape tool is a tool you can use to make basic geometric shapes like circles, triangles, rectangles, etc.). It didn't take me that long, only about a week. However, it was very frustrating because I used so many layers and there was almost always something that I noticed that was wrong. I used an oval for the belly, the white on the stomach, the head, the paws, the eyes, and the pupils. I used rectangles for almost everything else. However, the tail and lips of the muzzle were freehand. The nose part of the muzzle was a triangle and the ears were triangles too.
The second image (pictured above right) is yet again from the Storybook Project. If you need a refresher of the requirements and specifics about the projects, reread the first few sentences of the paragraph above this one. This is the result of changing the art style and it's the page that got approved and is in the final book! I freehand drew the foxes first, still with detailed eyes (with pupils and stuff) but matching the "freehanded style" of Camden and Juli's pages. I basically used the freehand tool (a tool that lets you draw whatever you want in any way so basically wherever your mouse goes the “ink” follows), drew a fox, copied it (ctrl + c on keyboard while selecting the fox), pasted it, (ctrl + v on keyboard to “paste” the thing I copied essentially cloning it), flipped it (it just makes the image flip in the sense of what it’s reflection would look like if I held it up to a mirror), and then fixed any of the several parts of the color that got outside the outline and colored in the parts that didn’t have color and that made it look as close to the other fox as I could get it. However, the teacher told us it had to match the style more. Camden, who was the main one drawing the characters (Juli focused more on the backgrounds), was more simplistic using an x-shape for their muzzles and not a smile. Another thing I noticed was that the eyes were vertical lines instead. I did the same on mine. I also made them much smaller to have more room for a background than the shape tool ones from the first image. So, remember how I said earlier I got them looking alike as I could after fixing the colors? Well, that wasn’t a good thing. So, we added little differences on both the foxes shown in this picture and on the coyotes on other pages so you could tell which character is which. These differences are that the fox on the right, Nick, has white ears, white paws, and white on the end of his tail, whereas, Ryker, the fox on the left, has pink ears, brown paws, and pink on the end of his tail. The background is meant to look like a cave with an opening to the den that the foxes live in.
This first draft doesn't look good at all compared to the final one! Well, okay, one could say it looks good but not as amazing as the second one. However, that's not how it shows growth. It shows growth because this image isn't made in Camden and Juli's style it's in my own by using the shape tool but the second one is. So, as you can tell, it’s pretty much all the shape tool. It even looks kind of creepy. Even if back then I thought it looked good it is nothing compared to the result. However, because I thought it looked good, I thought it was fine and didn't want to change it. However, the book wasn't consistent. It looks nothing like anything else in the book, but we wanted the images to be consistent! So, we decided we had to choose out of a few solutions. One, we all change every other page to my style. Two, I change my page that I'm working on their style. Lastly, three, we change every page and do a mix of our styles. In the end we chose one because it was the easiest and I already thought their pages looked better than mine once I saw them anyways. The reason why I was so confused is that they already had a plan and talked about it the day I was absent which was the first day. That means that this was my first day. I was expecting them to talk to me about a plan they had made the day before. I even asked. But they said they didn’t have one because they didn’t really know what kind of plan we would have. I can’t say I had a better idea. I didn’t know what we would do for a plan. We couldn’t think of one. The only thing we thought up was that we would do our own thing on the page we had picked and then come together and try to get them approved by the teachers.
This is the finished page. I hand drew it instead of using the shape tool. I matched the simplistic style. The body, paws, and head look a lot more freestyle drawn. This matches Camden's style just as they had it on all the other pages. So, it's my artwork, Camden's style, and Juli's background so we all worked together and created this common solution to fix my page (more specifically the style as I said earlier). We collaborated on this in many ways. For example, we critiques it afterword to make sure we liked it and combined ideas and discussed them first before adding them, to make sure that we all used each other’s ideas unlike just going in and drawing pages like we did initially and then us all having different styles except the fact that Juli and Camden's were both freestyle so it made them fall under the same category of style while mine stook out like a sore thumb. Now, it blends in perfectly and isn't as creepy as it used to be.
To get more into the specifics, these prove that I grew because this project took almost all year, so it shows I grew throughout most of the year (that's also why I chose this project over other things). What I did was I thought I liked my group member's drawing style and even though I would have to redo some parts of my drawing for that page in the book, I still told them that I would rather redo my page especially because a lot of the pictures were already done by my other group members who had the different style because I had to miss a day for a doctor's appointment. However, my solution to this problem shows that I grew in some way because I'm not sure if I would have done something like this last year. I changed quite a few things about my book just for the good of the group. They also prove it because collaboration means working together and solving problems together. We didn't collaborate well the first time. The only freehand parts were the tail, the definition of the muzzle (the curved line over the muzzle that is a pitiful attempt to make it look at least sort of 3D), and the "lips" of the muzzle. Even all of the fill in was shape tool, because I would either put a shape of that color over the part I wanted to fill in (i.e. rectangular brown parts on the bottom part of the paws) or just choose the shape fill option when adding any of the shapes to the picture. I also used a lot of line tool, which wasn’t good. It just made my drawing look too boxy and stiff compared to everything else. We did not all like the first picture. It did not look like the other pages at all because I thought we would be using more tools like the shape tool instead of freestyling it. It didn’t match what they thought we had communicated as what we had planned, but we didn’t have a plan at all. This is because we didn’t collaborate enough to create a plan. However, the second time around we were ready, and we wanted to collaborate correctly this time. That's what we did. We came to a few solutions together, decided which one was the best together, they gave me feedback on whether it was good to make it better to make sure we all liked it. We also had a plan this time. The plan was to use no shape tool and just use freehand. We made sure of that. I even redid it a few times to see how close I could get to the simplistic freehand style, and it did well in the end. I even tried setting the image to a similar scale as theirs (example of a scale would be: 0.25 cm = 1 inch). I also tried to make the outline have the exact same thickness and "brush" as it did on theirs. I also shared my screen so we could all check it together multiple times and worked together to decide what we thought made it look as similar as we could. Plus, I had multiple attempts in between the first and this that got critiqued in some way to fix it or make it better, so, we would work together to help each other know when we think a picture is good and should be approved or critiqued by the teachers. We would stop what we were doing to critique each other, even if it wasn’t an image we had worked on yet (for example, if Camden and Juli did the background for an image and I hadn’t added the characters, I would still stop to help critique). I even changed the eyes to be less detailed and just be lines and changed the mouth to be an x-shape which matched its simplistic style. Juli drew the background but she couldn't upload her finished background because of technical issues! So, we had Camden try to replicate it, then Camden added anything they felt was necessary to add to the background. It was Camden's original idea for the freestyle simplistic art style. We all critiqued the background then too, and then we showed the teachers to approve it once we all liked it together. All of this was us doing things together and working together which is what collaboration is. Plus, last year, I don't think I would've done what we did. I would've more just wanted to do what I wanted to do even if it wasn't what everyone wanted to do (i.e. this year keep my style) but I didn’t. Plus, instead of assigning these page by page for one person to handle a number of pages, we had one person do half the characters (I did mostly the foxes and bunnies, while Camden took care of the coyotes and the hedgehogs and Mr. Owl who was the only owl in the entire book) and the other person do the other half, and the third person does backgrounds and helps with characters. Of course, we even helped each other in other ways, like Camden did shading for the backgrounds that Juli couldn’t and I would help fix parts of the backgrounds, and Camden would draw a fox or start working on a page with foxes on it when I didn't have enough time and Camden was done. I feel like last year, I wouldn't have liked this because I never wanted to make someone else feel like they have to do my job for me, I didn't want to make them work more than what we agreed upon. But this year, Camden took it upon themself to work on one of my pages and then we decided it was okay and I grew because of that. Plus, I helped do parts of Juli’s pages and that also made me grow because I also didn’t want me to have to work more than we decided initially last year. On all of the pages, one person did the background (Juli or Camden), and one person did the characters (either me or Camden and sometimes Camden would add shading as well), so, whenever we put together a page or finished it, it was showing that we worked together and collaborated. We even critiqued each other on the pages to make sure we all liked them before asking for confirmation from the teachers! So, in one way or another we worked together to help transform that first artifact into the beautiful second one along with all the other pages in our book.
In conclusion, yes, as you can see, I grew in collaboration this year. I worked together with others in a much better way than last year. The reason why this shows growth is because this will help me in the future. To give an example, I want to be an engineer when I grow up. More specifically, an electrical engineer. Often, engineers work together even if they're from different fields of engineering. Do you think I would be successful as an electrical engineer if I were to not try and work together well with the other engineer? No. Besides, just being a student here at DRSS means I'll need this skill because there are many big projects (and even if they aren't big projects, just projects in general) here at DRSS that will require me to work in groups with people because here at DRSS that's something the school heavily encourages us to do. Collaboration is even one of the five qualities here at DRSS which means that it is most definitely something I'm going to need here in the future!