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If you’ll remember, I said at the end of this post that there was more to the assignment.
1. I had to find a shape from within my three doodles. The most obvious to me was the series of fibonacci proportionate circles, six of them.
2. I had to construct the 2D shape out of some kind of material. I’m cheap (and a little obsessed with the possibilities of paper), so I picked cardstock. We were all required to construct four instances of our shape. I cut out the 24 circles separately.
3. Next, we were required to… play. “Get in the sandbox,” experiment, look for cool ways that the shapes could go together. We even had a class session dedicated to this process – we all came in our pajamas and brought breakfast. We also brought every childhood construction toy we could lay our hands on! Then we got on the floor and played.
After trying lots of different things, I found out that my 24 circles fit perfectly into this configuration that I really liked. The point is, I couldn’t have planned this result and worked towards it from the beginning – there are some things that we discover only by being brave enough to experiment and fail!
4. I taped my circles together, colored them with permanent marker, and then used to wire to float the smaller elements a few inches in front of the large one. It turned into a very stylish wall hanging!
My bubbles.
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This is an early Fundamentals of Design assignment to teaching cross-hatching and sensitivity to value. I couldn’t post it until now, because it became my sister Olivia’s 13th birthday present! On January 7th, she had a purity ceremony, some of the elements of which you can see in the final images. I’m so thrilled at the way my little Pookie has grown into a woman worthy of honor and celebration!!
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A study in composition. Three crops, and then the fourth image is the original photograph, taken in the neighborhood across the street.
Disclaimer. Honestly, I put so little effort into this assignment that I almost forgot to post it. Photography is not my thing…
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If you don’t know anything about the Divine Ratio/Fibonacci numbers, you need to go exploring. This ratio of 1 : 1.618 is found over and over in the things that we call beautiful. Like humans,
favorite buildings,
and uncategorizable stuff.
Finding and measuring out the Divine Ratio in images like these was our first assignment. The second was to create three “doodles” that each include at least 10 instances of the Divine Ratio. Here are mine.
There’s more! The next assignment built off of the doodles, and I’ll post that when I manage to get pictures of it.
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How would you create an non-objective image that communicates all of the following?
Bold Playful Congested
Here’s more or less what first came to my mind.
Medium: permanent marker, more permanent marker, and white-out. Smelling it yet? mmmmm…..
What I was imagining was almost photographic, rows of these black bulbs with the crazy stuff shooting out. I don’t think I captured the its 3-dimensionality terribly well.
Bold is the black and the fact that things are coming at you, playful is the color and shape of the shoots, and congested is the fact that they’re all up against each other.
09
In Fundamentals of Design, we had to take a single shape and create a composition with a clear focal point, preferably simply by placement.
Yes, this image is actually three-dimensional. The As are affixed to little stacks of plastic squares I cut from packaging. I never pass up an opportunity to work with depth when I can!
My idea is that the big As are together tossing the small A into the air.
Other students interpreted the image differently. The most interesting by far had to do with being lowered by a wire to join the rows of can-can dancers. What does it make YOU think of?
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I hope this little guy makes you grin. I get rather elated just looking at him.
Snails occupy a very special place in my heart.
No, I’m not weird – snails take me back to my first magical months in Europe at the age of ten. But now there’s a DOUBLE MEANING thanks to the shape of it’s shell! Get it, huh, huh? Some of you will.
Oh, and the ideas I gave up in favor of the snail? A chair, and a globe. I really was going to do the globe. But this has turned out to be so much better. Personal, but without the TCK cliché!
Ok, now on to an actual explanation of the assignment. This is our project related to Line in the class called Fundamentals of Design. It’s extremely cool that we are taking a typically 2D element, line, and giving it a 3D application. THEN we bring it back into two dimensions with a drawing from observation. Can you tell our professor is a sculptor?
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I’m learning some important things at art school. For example:
The number one killer of artistic passion is greed.
This truth is easily observable out there in the industry. But it has been doubly confirmed to me simply through my short time at the Art Institutes.
In my opinion, too many teachers put too much emphasis on “career preparation” here. They almost have their own dialect in which every other sentence translates roughly as “what you’re learning is going to make you money.”
Great. It’s good to know that before choosing a program of study… but it’s bad habit to make students forever dependent on that carrot dangling in front of them. Commercial art is a means to money – and a whole lot more. And even money is not an end in itself.
Because of the materialistic focus, I was starting to lose sight of why I was even here. And then, in Jacob Dobson’s class, I found it again – Oh yeah, graphic design is positively life-giving for me. I like sensing when something is right and wrong. I get a thrill when a new visual concept shows up in my brain.
It’s nice, because we actually discuss art in his class, not the rat race.
This morning we looked at the influence of greed on art, among other things. This schema of Jacob’s explains a lot of things, so I’m reproducing it here.
Elements & Principles of Design Hunt
My first assignment in Jacob’s class involved searching the internet for design pieces that exemplified an element or a principle of design. I’m just going to give these as links, so that I don’t mess up as far as copyright is concerned.
A color wheel assignment and a perspective drawing assignment are in the works. Stay tuned.
