Creative Throwdown

This whole joint project started as an experiment when I saw Sharon's piece "Judgment" and my imagination just took off like a rocket. I sat down and created the text for "The Harbinger" in an embarrassingly short period of time. She really liked it and suggested we put it together on Urban Signz as a joint piece.

We realized that this would be an interesting way to explore material for a graphic novel we've been thinking about co-creating. We're not committed to a specific direction at this point because we want to keep our options open. That's a really nifty way of saying we don't have a clue.

Strangely, the whole business seems to be taking on a life of its own, leading us down this rather apocalyptic path into the nightmares of the unnamed city. In the interest of full disclosure, we're having fun with it and just sitting back to see where it takes us.

So, one discovery we've made is that going from image to text is challenging, but the richness of the images Sharon creates tend to amp up my imagination and point me in a direction. I think it's a function of that "picture = thousand words" phenomenon.

Our latest round of creative throwdown goes the other direction, which I think is going to be more challenging. I wrote a piece and sent it off to Sharon to create a complementary image. I had a huge, rich tapestry of visual content to work from, but she's stuck with 150 words.

Oh, and one other note is that we don't consult each other during the creative throwdown. We work independently, reacting to the image or text we've been given.

I'm excited to see where her imagination takes my text in this next round. Stay tuned.