Research
My first project to kick off the academic year of 2021 was a conceal/reveal composition. The project wanted me to explore and develop a composition from a single word, a homonym. A homonym is a word with one spelling, but multiple meanings. I was challenged to explore compositional techniques and principal elements to develop this word into a three-dimensional tunnel book. Your denotation of the word would be seen in the physical composition, and the connotation of the word would be inscribed into the back layer and seen when a light is shown through. The design process through all of this would help me reach the end objectives. One of which to show I can use compositional elements and principles of design to construct and demonstrate design intention, to experiment with components of 3D to 2D forms and image building techniques with vocabulary, and to define and apply observational analysis techniques to define and build my design intention.
Exercise 1: Text, figure, ground, closure
So, to start off this project I did a small-scale walkthrough to just start generating ideas around text, figure, ground, and closure. I was tasked to use my initials and throw an image that represents me into the negative space of the letter. The combination of my initials and image would be personal to me and give a small impression of myself and what I like. The goal was to create a simple image to take up negative space and be cut out on the laser cut and continue to use Adobe and vector software to create a final composition.
So, after the example, it was time to start progressing in the project. In the past, I have had trouble staying focused and being motivated within a project when it isn’t something I enjoy. So, with that being said there was an unlimited number of words to choose from, but I wanted to do something personal. To begin brainstorming I came up with about 10 homonyms and homographs that I thought were somewhat interesting. So, after brainstorming I landed on the word grace. The denotation of grace is to move with elegance or to show courtesy or goodwill. At first, that seemed like really the only definition of it, however, grace can also be the name of someone. So, I was able to find something that was personal to me. My final idea may not come across as easily as other words would, but I liked my idea and wanted to pursue it.
Iterations
So, I started the iteration phase where I drew out tons of drawings representing both the denotative and connotative definitions of the word. The denotation of the word was the simple part. I just had to do some image gathering to find out what things demonstrate and display grace. The hard part would be showing my personal relation to Grace. There is a long story as to who Grace is. She is somehow who I was extremely close to for a long time, but over time things changed and I lost the person who I once held so close to myself. So, my first thoughts were to demonstrate almost the opposite of grace where I display the negative emotions and feelings that came with this person while trying to construct an element of elegance in the same composition. After running through multiple iterations and ideas as seen below, I came to the conclusion that I was stretching my idea too far outside the box.
I now went back to the drawing board. I first reworked my imagery of what grace looks like in a denotative way. After that, I decided I wanted to make my definition of grace the reveal aspect of my composition. I decided to focus on the entire composition having a sense of grace while still showing a sense of loss of this person Grace. One of the problems I ran into while doing this was there is not one definitive thing that represents grace, so I had to come up with a way of explaining it while still being subtly. So, I had actually gotten inspiration from a song on my idea. I found that some people see grace in the stars as they are such a vast thing that brings peace, and a lot of people find purpose within stars. In turn, I had come up with the idea of writing her name in the star so that maybe the viewer could make the connection between my images of grace and the silhouette of her. I also decided that if I am going to make this personal to myself and Grace that I should find a way to properly represent so I used an actual picture of the two of us and abstracted our arms to fit within the context of the composition. So, although almost all viewers would not recognize the silhouette I know if I or she looked at it we would immediately recognize ourselves. At this point I had created about 3 rough drafts of my imagery that I felt good about that can be seen below. All displaying my ideas in different ways working differently with similar and different images and different perspectives and placements.
Concept Statement
The homonym used with the composition is grace. Someone’s initial thoughts when they hear the word grace tend to be something along the lines of compassion or possessing elegance. Grace be seen in little things like a starry night or flower petals falling in the wind. Another representation of grace can be seen written in the stars. The other meaning for grace is more personal to me in the fact that it is the name of someone that I used to be close to. Grace is someone I used to know like no other person however, over time that seemed to change, and I had to lose someone that I was once so close with. Within the reveal of the composition, there is a depiction of Grace that is an actual silhouette of her. The foreground is representing the denotation of grace within the starry night as well as the flower petals. In addition, when the composition is hit with the light the connotative definition of grace is revealed al0ong with the sense of loss or distance. So, grace stands for both a sense of elegance, as well as losing a person named Grace and the feelings she represents to me and I have tried to create the bridge between the two.
Production
At this point, I had my images ready and I just had to play with placement and perspective to help emphasize certain elements of the composition. I then settled on a final design and began constructing the physical tunnel book. The dimensions are 10”x8”. I felt a landscape orientation helped communicate the feelings of the composition better than a square figure would have. I was not able to use the laser cutter for my final composition, but I was still able to create my layers on Adobe Illustrator to practice that aspect of the project. So, I created the tunnel book out of Bristol based on resources given to us. After finishing the book, I created the layers with my images and had to use multiple layer techniques to hide images until the light came into play.
Portfolio Project
View final project at Reveal/Conceal Project