QUILL ACADEMY
Role: Character Design, Illustration
Company: Art of Problem Solving
Published: 2024
Art of Problem Solving's 2024 Hackathon was an event set forth by the Research & Development department with the purpose of pausing work for a week in order to come up with a series of new products, initiatives, with the potential of receiving wider financial backing in the future. The Language Arts department set out to create a comic book prototype titled Quill Academy which, like our Beast Academy product line, sought to teach students Language Arts through a cast of characters journeying through a world where creatures have forgotten how to identify themselves through the use of language. The story's inciting incident would set the students up to learn language & critical thinking skills in order to give back the knowledge that was lost to the world and its creatures.
SKETCH, SILHOUTTES, LINEART
As part of the Language Arts team, I was tasked with the creation of a bestiary that would be used as part of a series of course learning pages called the Wonder Wiki where students would have to identify different creature's body parts in order to eventually create & draw their own. My first day out of the week involved sitting down with the leadership team to discuss creature concepts that would both fit the world's lore, while also including several distinct body parts that would serve as clear identifiers for the students to learn from. Creatively speaking, this was a great challenge that taught me how to create unique and interesting character silhouettes that told a story and communicated movement through mere shape alone.
COLOR
After using the first few days out of the week to sketch out and polish several creature concepts and linearts (as seen above), we picked the two with the most amount of visual & lore interest, and set out to color and develop those further. We were running on very limited time, so I blocked in the colors and details very quickly, while letting most of the lineart do the work.
In choosing the color palette, I wanted to use vibrant colors that would also fit well within an encyclopedia - something lively, but not to flashy. The end result were the Merewolf (left) and Flamefin (right) coming to life.
Fearsome warriors of Wondermoore's plains, the Merewolf uses the power of the rainbow and the black hole at the tip of its tail to create arrows of light and travel through the skies. The Flamefin on the other hand dashes underneath the waves at high speeds, cooking it's prey with its steamy breath before eating it.
WONDER WIKI
While working on completing my illustrations, I would send the linearts and unfinished designs to our graphic designer, Liza Marino, who was working non-stop on Quill Academy's Wonder Wiki. The wiki was to have separate sections dedicated to each of the beast types I had created, which were namely a family of mammalian creatures, a species of reptilian insect hybrids, and a pair of aquatic critters. After going through the wiki, students would complete the questions on the practice pages designed to train their visual identification skills. The final pages depicted the illustrated creatures in bigger detail with more intricate questions asking the students to identify specifics about their anatomy in order to prep them for the final puzzle challenge: designing their own Wonder Wiki creature.
WINNING THE GOLD
The end of the week, each Hackathon team was tasked with showcasing their individual projects in a five-minute presentation to the rest of the company. Our Quill Academy leader, Language Arts dept. head Jack Sanchez, started off by having his team hand out a series of physical Quill Academy booklets the rest of the folks at AoPS could sift through while he presented revenue projections that the development of a product such as this could bring to the company.
What was the end result of all of our efforts? The top two most prestigious awards of the week. We couldn't have been more floored, especially due to the fact that we had succeeded so big as a language arts initiative in a predominantly math-centric company.
CREDITS
Creative Directors: Jack Sanchez, Greta Selman, Erich Owen
Character Design & Illustration: Nestor Tomaselli
Graphic Design & Cover Art: Liza Marino, Doga Ari
Writers: Dane Scott, Matt Granoff, Kalin Cameron
Print Distribution: Liza Marino