Week 3: Create an award for a person on campus, celebrating a quality you value.

The award itself will be made with Birch wood (yellow area) and Walnut (red area)

CONCEPT:
Last year, I did a portrait of Dr. Battalora, a professor here at SXU, for my drawing class.
She is a phenomenal professor of race and gender, and has since become a friend and mentor.

I want to honor her by naming the "trophy/award" in this week's assignment after her. Since she is a champion for community matters, I decided to create a "Unity Award" for students that excel in contributions to their community.

Last year, while creating a poster supporting the wearing of headscarves, I met Diana Khattab. As president of the Muslim Student Association on campus, Diana was friendly and honest with me regarding her thoughts on my piece. While her input, and the input of her team at the MSA was invaluable in completing my work, it was her attitude, and leadership that really stood out to me. Her group was cooperative, excited, open and dedicated, and it was clear that they followed her lead.

I want to create a trophy/award for Diana to thank her for her leadership skills and honor both her and Dr. Battalora for their continued efforts in creating a healthy and diverse environment here at SXU.

COMPOSITION:
To create the design for my trophy, I used Adobe Illustrator CC, creating the shapes and using the shape builder tool to knock out unwanted areas. In the red area above, I took a photo of Chicago and utilized the image trace tool to create a vector outline. I set the type and the skyline to a thicker line than the cutouts so that the laser would treat those as raster, and simply etch them rather than cut all the way through.

CRAFT:
I was able to arrange the shapes on the artboard in such a way that I was able to get all of them on one 24"x12" sheet of Baltic Birch.