Research
My first visualization principles project this semester was an in-depth project for an interpretative collage. I was to explore how visualization can be applied into a process to reflect upon based on my interpretation of one of three stories. The objectives of the project are to identify important parts of a story and how one’s interpretation can be communicated through design elements and principles, applying visualization as a reflective process to find meaning, evaluating different interpretations by finding what design principles were applied and which were most important. As well as, applying color theory to help support my principles, element, and interpretation, and applying intention through the means of a digital collage.
Exercise 1: Seeing Words
The purpose of exercise one was to read other poems introduced within the class and create five visuals pulling imagery from the beginning, middle, and end. I had to opportunity to create my own, edit current images, or just pull images from the internet to describe the setting and area and create a random set of images. This was a good introduction to the research that would eventually lead me to my image gathering for my final composition.
So, I began my process by reading through each story. After reading through all of them one immediately stood out to me. After reading “Oranges” by Gary Soto I knew it was the story I wanted to choose. Of the three it was the story I visualized most easily and immediately had my own interpretation for. The story follows a young boy and girl as they go to a corner store and he buys her candy bar with only a nickel and orange. I knew that with this story I wanted to shed light on the little things and what the children saw as valuable. For the boy, this was trading his only nickel and orange to get something the young girl really wanted, a candy bar. Although this was not actually enough for the candy, the cashier let him buy it with everything he had. With all of this being said, through my interpretation I wanted the small items each child had to represent them and the emotions they had. In addition, I wanted to use color to help emphasize these things even more. Because although an orange and a nickel do not hold much value, it meant a lot to the boy to give that up, so it shows how he felt about the girl and was able to sacrifice all he had to make her happy.
Exercise 2: Resource Gathering
Exercise two was all about finding images that you liked for your selected story. This builds right off of the first exercise where I continue to do image gathering, but now towards the final composition. I was now at the point of pulling in images to help represent my ideas. I tried to find at least 10 pictures to represent the important items, children, and settings. After a while, I was able to gather a decent-sized library of images to choose from. So now everyone doing the same story was able to share their images with each other and I was able to find more images I wanted to incorporate in my story that I hadn’t seen myself.
Exercise 3: Creating Harmony
Exercise three was my first experimentation with photoshop, and it went surprisingly well. It wasn’t something we turned in, but it was to just experiment with actually making collages with a little bit of purpose. I personally worked with diagrammatic space and just played around in Photoshop to get a feel of what that type of style feels like. I did enjoy working with it, but I didn’t feel like it could translate to my composition, but I think it was still helpful regardless.
Iterations
After gathering up all these images I was able to start piecing together which ones worked with other ones and how I would be able to create a sense of harmony in my collage with all of these random images. I first noticed that I was going to need a way to draw emphasis to these images when realistically they are very small. My first thoughts were to play with color. I would create a black and white background and only color in the objects that contributed to the emotions within the story. So, I began to experiment with that and realized that that just wasn’t enough, I needed something else to help emphasize them. My next thoughts were to play with scale; however, I was unsure of how I was going to approach this. After talking to my professor, we defined the differences between a composition being credible and realistic. For this project we want it to be very credible which means that you’ll lose some realism within the collage.
Concept Statement
After reading “Oranges” by Gary Soto I knew it was the story I wanted to pull my own interpretation from. I immediately felt that the main takeaway from the narration was how important the little things can be. Everyone values things at a different price, so for kids, it is definitely different than what we value. So, a young boy giving his only nickel and orange to get a young girl a candy bar shows just how much he cares for her. By giving up all he had to make her happy was beautiful in the sense that most people do not see much value in a coin and fruit. But for the boy, it’s a lot and it was enough to help him do what he wanted to. I knew then that I would use color, scale, and quantity to draw emphasis to these items. My focus was to draw the viewer into the small items like the orange, nickel, and candy bar to hopefully get across the emotions felt between the young boy and girl. I think the composition captures the usage of the principles I mentioned nicely to show the harmony between all aspects of the composition to successfully communicate my own interpretation of the story.
Production
After experimenting with some random abstraction where I fluctuated scale and played with the number of these items, I found that my composition became more credible when I toyed around with the smaller items on the right. My whole interpretation is to make the small objects stand out and represent each character’s emotions towards the other. So, this experimentation was really good for my final product as it was something that was still realistic, but its strongest feature is its credibility while still communicating my interpretation of the story.
References
https://clicheloveblog.wordpress.com/2015/04/20/young-love-social-scripts/
https://clutterbusting.com/breathe/
https://nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bestand:Jefferson-Nickel-Unc-Obv.jpg
https://newcastlebeach.org/images/orange-8.jpg
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRBAu06LwE5QDAZDOSQBwiyJHf_gbxQHP6GXw&usqp=CAU
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ3ITxTbyz1SITiEFgDZG5BCUzo7hBIf0bQtw&usqp=CAU
Portfolio Project
View final project at Interpretive Collage Project