A Wheel of Life

Early on in the project I was working on this as I collected more and more drawings. I wanted a simple visual representation of the animation that could be taken in all at once, and easily understood as a kind of “phylogenetic tree” or family tree. This was my first iteration, using the first two groups I had collected drawings from (the ones in the animation are on the left there).

Of course, as more drawings came in, the image got bigger, and turned into more of a wheel…

It’s fun seeing them all at once, isn’t it? I was thinking of somehow making it a kind of interactive physical wheel somehow but never really got that far, although I did make a rudimentary interactive Flash version.

Here was my handy legend I made in order to keep myself organized while I was building the thing. Each section of the wheel is a different group, so Patrick Henry School of Science and Art is on the upper left, the VCU animation class is on the upper right, etc. Each band of color marks a new generation in the pictures, and is represented by a colored line.

Recently I crushed these guys into a more manageable poster size for the Richmond Public Library.

Here they look almost like some lineage with medieval coat of arms. The poster is about 2 feet by 3 feet, so while they aren’t full size they’re still big enough to make out the fun details.

On another note, someone had asked me whether or not the kids drew the background elements of the animation , and as a matter of fact, they didn’t! That was something I did myself, trying to match the style of a young kid, and of course using crayons. I’ll eventually be posting images of all my original background elements and sketches, some of which weren’t even used, so be sure to check back later.