A Colorful Jungle Collaboration for Earth Day 2021

It’s been a little over a month since Earth Day 2021, but I wanted to make sure this special collaboration with my good friend and fellow artist Marina Li had a permanent home.

Marina and I have pretty different aesthetics, but we both love to capture nature and animals in our work.

My work on the left and Marina’s is above. Click to see more of her work!

I’d learned about orangutans and palm oil on a recent trip to the zoo. Marina was much better versed on the issue and we thought it could make a good topic for our Earth Day collaboration.

She had the idea of making the foliage and orangutans disappear to represent what was happening in the rainforests of Southeast Asia due to the unethical sourcing of palm oil. Here are a couple of her preliminary sketches that I based the collage on:

Once we had our topic selected, we each made a bunch of orangutans, trees, flowers, and other jungle foliage. Here’s how we each interpreted the stars of the show:

We both worked traditionally, Marina with watercolor and pencil and me with ink and highlighter. When we finished the art, we scanned and edited each individual piece. Here’s a glimpse of what some of my original artwork looked like:

I knew I wanted the elements to be fairly simple and then repeat, edit and move them around. A rainforest is super lush and colorful, so I wanted to recreate that with a digital collage.

Marina wrote the copy, so I was in charge of the layout. She sent her final artwork to me in a psd:

And I got to work! We definitely each had our own unique style. But with lots of layers and a bit of color tweaking, it all came together perfectly in the end.

Here are the final images for you to enjoy… and learn about the depletion of the Earth’s resources by greedy corporations and the consequential dwindling of orangutan populations in Southeast Asia. Thanks again to my brilliant collaborator Marina!

Resources & Further Reading:

https://orangutan.org/palmoil/

https://www.orangutan.org.au/

https://www.thegreatprojects.com/palm-oil-a-dark-future-for-orangutans/

Check out our other collaborations!

It’s kind of become an annual thing! Marina and I have also made artwork to celebrate International Women’s Day in 2019 and World Ocean’s Day in 2020.

Also, since you’ve come this far and might want to put a name to the face… here we are in high school. Where it all began 😅