Research: what we learned from the lecture and videos in carmen about principles of design and the definitions and examples of each including: emphasis, pattern, balance, contrast, scale , movement, Harmony, unity, variety
Exercises:
This pictures shows some of the out comes of the exercise where I took different sizes of different shapes and cut them out and laid them on top of one another to create a new shape.
This picture shows some of the shapes that I had discovered and created with the exterior lines and intersections of lines through the overlapped shapes shown above. I used lines that already visibly existed as well as lines that are not seen but van be added by drawing lines from one point or intersection to another by tracing over the arrangement of multiple shapes. At first I was combining both geometric lines and curvilinear lines to create shapes and then I started making them all one or the other, and even experimented with making the geometric shapes curvilinear and vice versa.
I then found the shapes that stood out the most to me that were curvilinear and geometric. I then had to create compositions to make each shape both static and dynamic. I also learned that the shape on the right was too technical and did not quite resemble its a solid shape.
I closed off the shape making it more solid and found the compositions I liked using a dot and a line that acted as other shapes to help portray if my shapes were static or dynamic. I first created my compositions in Adobe Illustrator.
I then moved over to physical copies creating my compositions.
top left: Stationed, using balance, static
top right: Beyond, using movement, dynamic
bottom left: Stuck, using unity, static
bottom right: Drip, using variety, dynamic
Iterations:
As I worked towards final production I had to chose to work with one of the titles of my previous compositions, I chose Beyond. following the order of the red numbers labeling the order I created them, I started at 1 thinking I wanted to use the principle of movement and I tried creating a setting that was not using the basic shapes. So I started over with a new design and with movement still in mind I came up with the new design and was thinking of going towards something until I realized that the principle of emphasis really stood out and took over, so I continued with that idea and made it less chaotic and “zoomed in” and aligned the shapes differently so that the negative showed shape that showed emphasis more than what I originally had, and made the composition look less crowded and yet still show strong emphasis.
Production:
I successfully finished my composition in illustrator by taking out the two very small triangles in the top because they did not add anything to the composition that was vital. I then downloaded an app to save it as the negative version so that my physical copy would look like the compositions I had originally created. I started working on the physical copy by printing out a picture of my composition scaled to the right size which took some trial and error. I then learned how to use the light table, which I used to tape that printed page onto and a paper over that so that I could accurately get the shapes that I needed outlined onto the top paper. I then took those shapes and cut them out using the cutting blade so that I could then trace the shapes onto a black paper to use as my final shapes. Tracing the shapes and cutting them out of the black paper was harder than I expected and I ended up having to redo multiple shapes, most likely because of how I was holding the blade, pencil, ruler or paper which caused small but important mistakes which I eventually got the hang of. I labeled all of the cut shapes on the back side where so that I knew where each piece should be placed and so that the label wouldn’t not show on the front. I then taped the printed paper to the final bristle paper square I had cut out, making sure each angle was a perfect 45 degree angle, and taped them both back to the light table so that I could glue on the shapes as accurately as possible. After lining everything up nicely, I glued it all down making sure that I did not use too much glue and where I placed the glue on the white paper so that it wouldn’t spill out. I ran into the problem of certain corners sticking up still because of me trying to be careful with the glue. So I cut out a small long piece of paper and put glue on the tip and went around to all the corners that needed it and smeared glue underneath them, which worked very well. I could still improve upon things like cutting and outlining shapes perfect the first time, or even maybe some up with a simpler way to reach the final outcome than what I did, another thing I had problems with was even though I had cut out everything exactly how they should have been there were still some minor mistakes like an edge being too long or with the first ring of triangles the edges would still over lap, I went back and fixed them up a little but I am still unaware of what caused this. A couple lessons I learned was how to line things up neatly with the light table, how to be accurate with the cutting blade and how to show principles of design through basic shapes.
