MORE Experimental Textiles

 Carrying on from this post we used view finders to select an area and then blow it up as a background

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I starred the ones which I picked to make big. We then did blind/left hand/masking tape/etc drawings and the like.

We then added into two of them. I chose the top two.

I hope you all like the accidental Alice in Wonderland piece.

(Disclaimer; if my parents are reading this, then that is not the hallway wall with tape on it. Definitely not.)

(No way.)

Textiles experimenting

We had still lifes to work from again, except this time we were experimenting in a textiley way. Enjoy!

(You know you love the melty fish face)

Why yes, I do like starfish.

Life Drawing, week 3

Thumbnails

Quick still life of found objects used for the colour pallet work in my sketchbook

Composition thumbnails

^ chosen thumbnail

Life Drawing, Week 2

No dinosaur poster this week, heartbreak.

"Understanding Visual Communication and Textiles"

Yeah. We got homework.
SO.

1. Identify four disciplines within 2D design.
 (Ooh, bullet points, shiny)

• Character design (video gaming/films/cartoons)
• Storyboarding (animation)
• Website design
• Fabric design

2. Identify a graphics/illustration/textiles magazine and find an article that interests you.

Evacuation of Dunkirk

John Craske, Woolwork

unfinished on his death, 1943

published in Selvedge magazine

I picked a textiles magazine because usually I'm not that interested in textiles, but this time I thought I'd mix it up a little. I ended up finding a really interesting article on how textile work has helped people cope with harsh circumstances. It gave the example of a mother who had lost her son and created cloth-work for an entire four poster bed, stitched word from high class Victorian women who had been left in work houses and asylums, and John Craske, who dealt with a tumour through stitch work.

I really like these, I've worked at creating images through textiles in previous projects as I enjoy that more than pattern making and I find it can lead to really interesting effects. Also, the work shown here had emotional links to it too.

3. Research two of 6 given artists

Steven Sagmeister

Story

2012

"Identity / logo design for "Story", a store in the meatpacking district of NYC that changes themes every six weeks. Designing the identity around the holding device created when the word story is sliced in half, the brackets that are created  hold the name of the current theme within. When the store is completely redesigned a new sign is made within a giant 3d logo on the wall."

Quote and image from --> here

Mathew Williamson

Spring/Summer 2012 blossom faze print

Image from

For the two artists I tried to pick art style that I would usually avoid- typography and print. I enjoyed the mix of simplicity and mess in Sagmeister's text use- a trait i often admire due to my messy handwriting- and the balancing of colours and tones in Mathew Williamson's prints made them very nice to look at.

Stay tuned for part four!

Part four now here!!

4. Reflect on how you have been influenced by your intro to 2D design

(more bullet points, my lucky week!)

• I'm more aware of the involvement of illustration work other than what you find in children's books, such as textbooks or even character design. I'm also more conscious of trying to create compositions within my work.
• I've been quite inspired by Olivier Kugler's way of working, as I quite like recording places, and it was nice to consider the gentle contrast he uses. I also liked Mathew Williamson's work for the colour, and I really enjoyed the talk by Peter Barber (Urban Canvas)
• Out of the four disciplines, I found illustration the most interesting, as it's a career I've considered and I often enjoy the styles of illustration work.

For anyone who didn't have the joy of waking up at 6am on thursday....

This was the sunrise.

Collage at College

So, on Tuesday there were a selection of still life arrangements on the tables in our studio. This was the one I was working with originally (apologies for the added pencil shavings, those weren't a clever use of juxtaposition or anything. Their presence was just.... present.)

We were given limited time to make and use a viewfinder to create twelve different compositions. I thought the page looked a bit plain so added a bit of colour later, mostly because my still life had such bright and contrasting colours.

The starred thumbnails were the ones I thought were best, and we were told to draw these out again, but to fill the page. The thumbnails I chose were picked because I find pictures with detailed areas against empty space quite appealing (seen in work by Annette Messager previously looked at here).

My chosen compositions.

(the photos are at a slightly different angle to how I was stood with the viewfinder)

Not quite so good at this scale, I thought.

(This image is rotated. It doesn't need to be, but it is. Maybe someday I will change this, but today is not that day.)

I thought this arrangement was quite interesting, but perhaps a little too plain.

Again with the rotated images. 

This was my favourite composition, as the off-centre-ness of it and the dull background card with the intense blue and red reinforce what I was saying about detail vs. emptiness. And, now that I think about it, the image is very nearly made up of primary colours, if you just want to be nice to me for a moment and ignore the green stalk. Otherwise, I have to bring up that red and green are complementary colours, making the chilli stand out more, etc etc.

And thus, having chosen a composition we began to work at a larger scale by making up collages.

(Yes, I tore up a book. I feel awful.)

If I'd thought this through, I probably would have used blue on the circle that IS blue, and emulsion on the negative space, and then wouldn't have run out of blue. But I do prefer this, as that probably would have looked too plain, and here I've accidentally echoed the shape of the chilli pepper with the graph paper. The circle at the edge manages to contrast that, which looks quite good.

After reviewing the image I realised that I needed the chilli to stand out more than it did, and so added it's shadow. As written in my sketchbook, I decided to "make the hole look more like a hole".

I was very tired on Tuesday.

I don't think it quite looks like the hole it truly is, but it does at least look more interesting.

Relationships

We got our first brief today, for the first block of our introduction stage (2D design): Relationships. In art. As in, how this line looks when it's next to that line. The lines aren't people.

First we had to look at an artists work, and then find a magazine image that interested us and annotate in our sketchbooks.

After that we drew a bit, but we could only draw the outline of what we were drawing, and we had to repeat it three times. It was pretty useful, I found I was looking a lot more than I usually would.