2020.09.09; thumbnails
Spent the night and morning sketching small thumbnails and coloring in little black squares. It was actually a very calming process generating compositions and challenging myself and lightly stretching the boundaries of the assignment. How not-square can I make a square? There were jumbles of thoughts on how to portray a specific movement or sentiment, rethinking, redrawing. How can I make a square look like it’s rotating? Can I use only one square? What about negative space? Does this remind you of something you’ve seen before? Related to this?
There were endlessly more 1.5" sized drawings I could’ve made which is the fascinating part of this all. The more I drew for one word led me to generate additional for another. The bouncing back and forth of ideas was captivating and quite exciting but one for another day with more hours to leisurely ponder about shapes. There are definitely some that I feel could be bettered by a tiny smidgen of a rotation, shrink, enlargement, shift, but we my brain could probably yap about that until eternity.
Unrelated additional comment on these little squares of squares, what has also surprised me was my revealed appreciation for the imperfections of shading a pencil provides. I’ve always been a follower of uniformity or sameness when coloring or filling in shapes but I dig the texture. A change in myself I didn’t realize I’d observe in this assignment.
2020.09.10; peer reviews
chortle warble. Pretty great sound effects.
Was partnered up with Minji today and wow did her work make mine seem very… hand done. The edges, the contrast, all very stunning. I do in fact miss a good crisp edge.
But all-in-all, today’s peer review was very eye-opening! I thoroughly enjoyed looking through her compositions and listening to her thought process. There were elements of memories and connections that she had that I’ve never thought of which were truly captivating to listen to. As an example, for comfort I was intrigued with one of her sketches: a drawing full of orthogonal squares with 45 degree tilted squares atop each one. It drew me in and as she explained it to represent candles, it quite frankly pretty much blew my mind. I thought it was such a unique interpretation of the word.
It was also incredibly interesting to compare instances that she lined with one word when I aligned it with another, resulting in two similar compositions for different words. They made a lot of sense in their own respective ways. For “order”, one of my first ideas was to mimic bricks. I was pleasantly surprised when I saw a near identical composition in her “comfort” sketches. “Protection” and “safety,” two words Minji used to describe a brick wall. And yes, it makes so much sense, it does convey a sense of comfort. We definitely connect many different aspects of design and emotions together; orderly and comfort have their intersection in a Venn diagram.
(lol am i doing this right?)
2020.09.16; illustrator
We have broken through the great barrier that is Adobe Illustrator. I’ve always wanted to learn how to use the application but either: 1) didn’t want to spend the money or 2) never was committed enough to learn it. But we are here, v’s, m’s, Ctrl’s, Alt’s, Shift’s, all in check, it’s smooth sailing so far.
It’s been a draining week so far and working on this assignment was a breath of fresh air I really needed. I looked at my hand drawn sketches but wasn’t drawn to a lot. Many, visually, felt like a lot, my brain couldn’t fathom the amounts of energy “playfulness” sketches were giving me. So I set a challenge for myself: can you convey these words with one square? With two? Oh? Well, that is in fact what I attempted. It was a challenge as I associate many of these words with relationships, a communication between two individuals or objects. To be honest, I definitely could’ve been much more creative with my one square, order composition. Actually, let me go fix that right now.
Rummaging and moving this new square around pretty much describes what happens in my head when thinking of a composition, but I can actually see it instead of praying it also works out on paper. Many times a composition with one object can become boring or uninteresting. During those times, it is always a challenge to entice the viewer, which usually is the world and the world is a pretty hard crowd to please. I have in no way shape or form mastered that yet. But regarding my thought process for this one square order composition, I actually find the third to be very serene, orderly, but with an edge (hee). The almost corner to corner diagonal is speaks so me as a very rule following convention, like in origami when you fold from corner to corner. But again, not quite. In my opinion, it does create some interest and quirk to the sketch, but then again, I hope I’m not the only one who is okay with it.
Playing around with the sizes, amount of rotation, number of squares definitely was a lot to think about. You can make more than an infinite amount of permutations in a composition, or really, one square. That… is pretty wild. Well this was a nice stop this morning. Out of the rapid typing at TOC for three days straight, the water being out from 7am to 5pm today and the weather just yeeting itself from the arms of summer, this was very pleasant.
See ya!
2020.09.23; denouement?
The journey has come this far. I believe we’ve passed the apex and are on the descent, the end is near! But from the comments and advice of classmates last week, there have been much change. Yes, they are not just one or two squares anymore as the neurotransmitters have been reawakened, slightly! There were mentions of some pieces not truly capturing the essence of the words we were working on: order, congestion and playfulness. For these, there is an association with relationships, relationships between a couple, multiple entities.
With my one-square methodology, that didn’t work. With order, I added more squares in discreet areas to lead the eye to perceive structure and a sameness. I worked with squares being the same size and negative spaces being equidistant.
Congestion also logically doesn’t quite mesh with a lone thing. “Traffic jam,” “stuck,” “trapped,” were used to describe the feeling of congestion. I focused on “stuffy” in my compositions. Here there is a lot of overlapping and the minimizing of space between squares.
For playfulness, it was noted that a spark of the emotion of playfulness was there but I can add more squares to swell that feeling. There was also a line established between that of playfulness and danger, and I believe that one of my past pieces was a daring one. There was a feeling of “steep slope” and playing on it which yes, I’d say ballsy for a square. So I did shave down that angle and know have 2 bouncing squares. Yay!
But I’m pretty pleased with the compositions. I think that they are definitely converging on elements I wanted to give off which I’m happy about. So much thanks to all my peers Amanda, Hannah for gently paving the way. I cannot wait to see everyone else’s stories of little (or big!) squares. ʕ·ᴥ·ʔ
2020.09.26; denouement.
Well, well. It is the Saturday before our final composition review and we see the end! It currently really is pixel pushing and finding the last bits of advice before finalizing everything. Last class I asked for advice on playfulness as I feel very distant and unattached to my past compositions. I felt very in a rut but was given advice to remove some squares and maybe include smaller ones to evoke more of a light-hearted, not-so-grounded piece with some more movement. I attempted to do so and have somewhat converged on a sketch that I’m okay with.
I’ve also been choosing between two comfort pieces but there is one that I enjoy looking at more and I believe it is because there is some continuation, the leading of the eye to a certain spot, in this case the valley of the trough. It feels less rigid than just having a flat horizontal line as a partitioning line.
Thank you Hannah for the advice on my tension piece! After blowing it up to 8x8" there were things I wanted to translate and also shrink. In addition, I did take your advice up on moving the squares in my order piece all the way to the edge. There was unnecessary closure that the viewer generates while looking at the piece and I felt as if it was better to just get rid of it (the white border around the full square). The thin bars between squares already lead the eye around the piece.
I think looking as a whole, the pieces work together. I find myself making compositions more towards the “heavy,” “dark” side even in past art that I’ve created. But I want to expand, so I hope in future projects I don’t sit back in the norm that I’m used to and do something unexpected from myself. That’d be cool.
2020.10.01.
It’s the week after and it’s been lovely seeing my classmates’ designs and seeing them evolve their compositions. Each person developed unique series and I’m inspired after seeing people’s creative outlook on each word, explaining and describing their thought process and how they ended up with what they had. It’s so interesting.
I had a lovely time completing this project and I cannot wait to continue onto typography. Wee!
