Layers: Process

Research

For this assignment, I conducted research on two things. Due to the large amount of freedom we had with the subject matter, I first researched things or places that had deep space with them. I had no idea where to start so to help guide my progress and what I was looking up, I created a mind map to keep track of my favorite ideas. Below is said mind map.

As you can see, there is a wide range of ideas here. After some careful thought, I decided to move forward with the idea of a tv scene. I was very unsure of where to go with this so I made some quick sketches to see what I could think of off the top of my head. Here are those sketches.

Out of these sketches, the one with the optical illusion intrigued me the most. I remember looking at paper optical illusions in class when we first got introduced to the project and so I imagined it’d be really cool to incorporate one into a tv screen. When thinking about optical illusions and tv screens, the idea of children being hypnotized by what they see on tv came to my mind. I thought this was a very interesting and relatable idea since everyone watches tv so I went full ahead with it.

  • Exercise #1:

This is an exercise we did in preparation for this project. The goal of the exercise was to create a design that incorporated an image into the negative space of our first initial. The image was supposed to mean something to you or reveal something about your personality. So, I decided to create a letter A that incorporated a sailboat into the negative space. The sailboat represents the idea of travel, which is something I love doing with my family and really want to do a lot in my future. Creating this design was super fun and something that helped me to experiment with negative space, which ended up something I heavily used in my final composition.

Concept Statement

As they grow and develop, children can be easily influenced by what they hear and see on tv. While some programs like Blues Clues and Sesame Street are educational, the large majority of what children are exposed to contains material that can “hypnotize” or induce unhealthy behavior within them. This negative relationship is a topic that has been thoroughly discussed within published articles and academic journals. However, it’s not represented equally as much in a visual sense through the use of advertisements and posters. Thus, my goal for this assignment is to produce an 8 inch by 4.75 inches layered paper composition that does just that; examine the harmful and hypnotic relationship children have with television. I will create the design on Illustrator, focusing on the different layers and how I can depict a sense of deep space within them. Once that is completed, I will cut the design out on a monochromatic range of black and white card stock paper using a Cricut. From there, the composition will be near complete, with the last step being to appropriately layer and affix them to one another. After it’s finalized, my project will hopefully spread awareness about the harmful effects of too much television consumption at a young age and illustrate what children could look like if things don’t change. It should ignite feelings of unrest and a want for said change.

Iterations

After choosing to move forward with the idea of a tv screen and how watching tv can hypnotize children, I started to sketch out possible iterations for my final. I really wanted to showcase the relationship between children and the physical aspect of the tv, so a lot of my initial sketches just had those two things in them. Here are a few of them.

Out of all of these ideas, I was the most drawn to the far left. I thought it most accurately showed the relationship between children and tv and used negative space to do so. From here, I practiced making two of my iterations on paper to get an idea of how it would work mechanically. I decided to create the one I just mentioned as well as the one to the right of the middle. Below are their paper iterations.

Production

#1

Wanting to make the glasses the focus of the composition, I decided to crop my design so they’d be more in the center than they were before. After I did this, I started to think about how I wanted to cut out the different layers. In my original paper version, I just cut out the two spirals within the glasses. This wasn’t an option for my final, however, so I decided to change the spirals to be rectangles that I could make different colors and simply stack on one another to achieve the same effect.

#2

After I had my final online version complete, I then cut out the different layers using one of our cricuts.

#3

Once the pieces were cut out, I started the process of attaching them to one another. The first piece I did was the inside of the glasses. I used little pieces of foam to stick them to each other and achieve a 3D effect.

#4

After I completed the eyes, this is what the glasses looked like.

#5

Now that the glasses were complete, I moved on to taping the glasses to the black layer. The sections that were taped are circled in red so they’re more easily recognizable.

#6

After that, I used the pieces of foam again to stick the light grey layer onto the back to finish my composition.

#7

After we finished the paper final, we created a color version. Using a square color theme, I created this version with blue, yellow, and purple. I wanted the hypnotic effect to translate into color so I researched different hypnotic color schemes and picked one I thought would look the best. It turned out exactly how I wanted and I’m very happy with it.

Link to Portfolio Project

Now that you know how it came to be made, here’s a link to my Layers page. Enjoy!

https://u.osu.edu/fricke-60/portfolio/layers/