Deciding the theme for my project would be “light” but not yet knowing what to do with that, I looked into some artists that has worked with light like Picasso and his light drawings and Cerith Wyn Evans’s huge sculptural light installations that I went to see at Tate Britain last year and really liked. Picasso’s drawings/photographs are so amazing but making something similar without it feeling like I’m just copying would be really difficult.
Child! Children are crayons. Because crayons are something you use (or at least I did) throughout your childhood but then you don’t anymore. Children are also movement, never sitting still, puzzles, colour, shapes and not thinking too hard about the world they inhabit. Wrote down ideas and connections to “child” and then went full on crayon mode as seen below.
After an intense brainstorming and idea day last Friday I have a lot of concepts for both “child” and “may” but not really any more for “old” which was the first word I started to think about. What I have is the research I did with lines and string but I don’t know how I am going to make it into gifs or if all my gifs for that word should be line based. I also keep going back to thinking about how all the gifs will look together and how they will relate when the words are so different and will be made in different ways. It’s blocking me a little bit.
Opting for the “just do something and see where it goes”- technique, I put needle and thread to paper and just started doing. These are the yarn sketches I made and the things I learned from doing it:
Diving further down into my three words, I decided to explore other ways to make them visual and began playing around with stamps and letters to see where that led me.
For this, I started to write the single word first somewhere on the paper and then developing it into something else after reading the word over and over and capturing what I felt while reading it. I thought it would be good to see what associations I made after actually constructing the word myself, putting the letters down with my own hands.
Experiments with letterpress to generate some ideas that reflect my movement. Started out with the word zero and then thought about the countdown to zero as well so I incorporated numerals too. The most ideal typeface to use for this had been Futura but as that wasn’t available, the closest I could get was Gill Sans which because of the super round O works pretty well (although the fancy R annoys me somewhat).
Then I started thinking about using the letters as shapes instead and made patterns with o and i which turned out pretty interesting. I really like the zero123 but also the red lines below and the pattern to the left of it. The countdown reflects the movement very well and the launching of a new way to look at and create art so using numbers in this way is something I could develop and refine to make it work better. Using Futura might make all the difference.
I have been looking more into the zero movement and especially the works of Yves Klein. Klein was maybe the most experimental out of the people associated with the movement and the real motor, working a lot with performance, sculptures and experimental painting. He painted using his hands, people’s bodies, fire and was obsessed with blue as he saw it as the perfect colour.
I looked into Heinz Mack’s work more as well. He does installations, sculptural work, textures.. but the thing I am interested in the most is his work with lines and his passion for making vibration. Pretty abstract and strange sounding maybe, but looking at his work it makes more sense:
This project focuses on design history and movements. The deliverables will be a folded A2-A5 16 pager describing my exploration of chosen movement, and a motion graphic outcome. Starting off, I looked into 3 different movements I find interesting and chose De Stijl, Zero and The Washington Colour School.
De Stijl: Around 1917-1931 as a reaction to WWI, a group of Dutch artists set out to remake the world through a utopian vision and harmony and order. Exploring the ideal fusion of form and function, they wanted to eliminate all representational components, reducing painting to its elements: straight lines, plane surfaces, rectangles, and the primary colours red, yellow, blue, black and white.
When designing, most people probably do the work subconsciously (thinking about shape, form, colour, pattern, emphasis, proportion). And sometimes, not thinking about what comes naturally, for me at least, can be in your way as I find I often over complicate things in my head instead of just doing something really simple, really fast.
Working fast and creating many posters that incorporates the different design principles and elements of design has kind of changed the way I look at a project- it doesn’t have to take forever to create something (in this case posters). And although the aim was producing 50 posters in 5 hours and I only got like 7 done, I really enjoyed this and the particular way of working- restraining yourself a bit in terms of what you’re allowed to use to convey a message forced me to simplify my ideas and think outside the box.
Sometimes we rely on randomness- being creative means that mistakes can be a good thing. And sometimes just playing with the components you have in front of you can be the best way to go because you don’t know what you’re after until you’ve done it.
A couple of days ago I explored some different ways of generating images from photographs, creating abstract and interesting results. Deriving meaning from photographs that didn’t mean just one thing, I made drawings and paintings from the emotions the image evoked or sorting it by the most to least dominant colour.
My line project is finished and it took a 180 turn! I tried to develop a snake fold thing that would have my images of lines folding out in the order I would see them on my way to uni from home but the craftsmanship of it all wouldn’t come together. It looked sloppy, unfinished and very much not what I was going for. So I ended up with boxes which I kind of touched upon in my brainstorming for this project but discarded. Here is the process!
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