Research
When I was looking into the word “Strecessary”, I did a little digging into how I could make the word itself induce stress. I ended up finding a research paper about color and how reds and yellows increase stress where green hues can decrease.
Minnesota State University Study
The font I used was from a google image which I traced back to a website called Handmadefont.com
Exercises
Exercise 1 – Orthographic
The project began with some hand-drawn practice, to understand what isometric is and how that’ll apply to our projects. Then we started picking a font and trying to create it in isometric with illustrator. It was pretty annoying, but I managed to understand how I would possibly be doing stuff in Illustrator.
Iterations
I used an online generator and just kinda started spitting words out onto the google sheets. One word I hadn’t used the generator for which was “Strecessary”.
From there, I just compiled 3 of my favorite words onto a drawing board and started exploring ways to organize them in isometric as well as illustrate them.
As a part of an exercise, I picked one word and just ran with it to see what stuff I could do with it in isometric. I picked “Youthenuous”, a word I made about the fragility of youth.
I’m gonna keep things pretty concise from here, however. So here are some other iterations I did around the word Strecessary, which is the word I chose to follow through with. This word was incredibly difficult to come up with ideas for as it wasn’t entirely something I could just draw out, you know? Stress can be illustrated in many ways most of which are abstract but the word NECESSARY just isn’t something I could think of ideas for without them being super lazy like a bunch of drawings of lungs or food. Technically, those are necessary right! Super lazy.
From that research paper I mentioned, I started applying red and yellow as well as crazy patterns to see the effect on the word. I wasn’t a fan of it so I went back to my list of ways I could illustrate stress and necessary. Around the end of class, I started exploring the idea of using narrative to illustrate my word.
After a discussion with my instructor, Zach, I began exploring what would end up leading me to finalizing my project. So let’s go look at that.
Production
I had a bit of an “a-ha” moment after the discussion with my instructor. My idea was to create a narrative centered around a time where I personally experienced what I would define as “strecessary”. That time would be the 2D to 3D Translation Project. How I’d do that would involve me taking my word and creating a sort of “origami” typography to reflect the physical qualities of the project, putting it into isometric, and including some spare folding parts and maybe some craft details like smeared glue or something. I was hopeful and really felt like I was onto something so I kept digging. Here’s what I started out with.
Still using red and yellow for the sort of stress inducing affect. It doesn’t do anything to be honest, but I liked the contrast between the two.
I started thinking about how much I didn’t like how empty everything was and I didn’t feel my intention was being communicated enough. I started experimenting with a free use program called “Isometric Interiors” which I found to help me visualize a literal scene in which I am having a bad time with the 2D and 3D project.
My final idea is to have the text placed above the scene and to depict myself in distress to tell a story visualizing the definition of “strecessary.
I started in Illustrator, working over the templates I made in the free program.
Here is what the scene looked like when I was finished.
Pretty good! Here’s the thing… it was a complete waste of time. I needed to export these into another program but for some reason, they were incredibly blurry no matter what I did and it was very noticeable. Frantically, I started tracing ProCreate by hand.
Firstly I matched the floor to create an isometric grid that I could follow.
I traced over the variants of myself, coloring everything (mostly) in blue hues to exhibit the horrible suffering I endured emotionally when doing this project. To speed this up, I basically drew everything in the scene, applied some blue hue that I felt contrasted and didn’t blend too harshly into its surroundings, shaded a little with a noise brush to imply lighting, and then duplicated the clocks to surround the scene.
When it came to my variants, I clothed them differently based on what I normally wear to imply the passing of time and create a relation to the clocks. The passing of time was one of the biggest stressors with the project and how small mistakes could take hours to fix or to make up for. I also explored where the definition could fit and how that would affect the composition.
I went through and added shading to smaller bits, separating the color’s layers and altering them accordingly. Then I added some smaller details like the scattered paper and crumpled one as well to illustrate the process of the project being both frustrating and involving a lot of paper.
I started working on the typography and experimented with it being extruded which subtly alluded to the 3D aspects of the fundamentals project. I didn’t like the look of it so I went with making it 2D with spare flaps and bits that created a 3D look to it.
I used a color palette that was cooler and calm, fitting with the cool hues of the scene I illustrated. I shaded and added texture to the text.
Final Production
