Making street signs and thinking that maybe I should have tried scrap booking...

Perhaps it was a bit dramatic for me to say that it could be weeks before I posted again. I think a break from the Right Brain Retrain could go very badly for me since this blog has become a sort of outlet to de-stress during hectic times. I've been so stressed out and trying to keep myself in overdrive for so long now that my hair is going grey!! Actually, I've been 'going grey' since I was 19, but during prolonged periods of stress I get a lot more grey hairs. At least my hair's not falling out. If that were the case I might have to seek the help of a professional who could prescribe me with a strong sedative. Anyway, where was I...

Ah, yes, I mentioned scrap booking in the title. I don't actually want to get into scrap booking, but I think I would have had a lot of fun if I had at some point in the last 10 years that I wasn't taking art classes. Paper art is becoming a favorite for me at this point. This is partially because I never knew the joys of rubber cement until this semester and partially because I had never really considered it a good medium for artistic expression... Well, of course, other than the paper you would draw or write or paint on.

This weeks assignment for Two-Dimensional Design was about one of the principles of organization known as Economy (The distillation of the image to the basic essentials for clarity of presentation). So, we made road signs. The objective was to choose three out of a list of six possible road signs and create a design that could quickly convey the signs' meaning to someone driving by. The sign stipulations are as follows: 6"x6" square which may be turned at a 45° angle to form a diamond, circle with 6.5" diameter or an 8" equilateral triangle sign constructed of colored paper and glued to Bristol board (attempting to use no more than 3 colors). I chose to create the following three signs:

Explanations Below (left to right)

Alien Sighting Area:

While this sign went through a couple of different transformations, the basic idea was there from the beginning. I knew that simply putting the unversally understood 'alien head' shape on the sign might not be enough to convey the entire message. While I saw many of my classmates choosing to use eyes and binoculars to express the concept, it was not my first instict. Living in the digital era means that when you are going sight seeing, you're going to want to document what you see so you can share it with people who weren't there. Nearly everybody has a camera these days, so I figured a simple thumbnail would suffice. As for the shape I chose, and alien sighting area is something I would not percieve as an urgent matter requiring the attention of every car passing by. And of course I chose green, why wouldn't I? The simple shape with the cool green color create a calm and orderly mood with this sign.

Spiders Ahead:

This sign is meant to be more cautionary. At first I had two lines depicting a road leading up to it, but then it looked like a giant spider, which is not the message I wanted to convey. I used the diamond shape to show that caution should be taken, but since the diamond is still a square it still comes across as orderly. Yellow is conventionally used to show when caution should be taken and the general design of the sign itself is modeled after countless other '[insert animal species here] ahead' signs. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Zombie Zone:

At first I wasn't even going to do this last one. "But Lucky," you might find yourself pondering, "Didn't you take your Sophomore Seminar on 'Society and the Modern Zombie'?" Well, you would be pondering correctly, assuming that you actually were pondering such a thing... I'm being generous because I'm not sure anybody really reads this thing anyway, but yes! I took a whole flippin' class on zombies: Why society loves them so much, how authors use zombie stories for social commentary and zombie survival strategies and techniques. So, why wouldn't I choose this sign? Because I knew that everybody wanted to do this sign. I don't pride myself on being a completely unique snowflake in a sea of shit bags, or anything. However, I do try to stray from the well beaten path. It is very difficult to stand out as an artist when you are doing the same thing as everyone else. But, as the deadline was approaching rapidly and I didn't even have a third design, I decided to return to this one and do it right.

Initially the sign was of just a brain with a bite taken out of it, but a brain is a very difficult object to simplify. So, the shocked human head with appropriately placed bite was sufficient. Triangles are supposed to be the universal symbol for danger, or hazard, or something to that effect. At first I had it upside down, but I thought right side up expressed a better sense of urgency. And of course it had to be red. Apart from the zombie apocalypse being a rather bloody affair, red is used to catch attention fast. Stop signs as well as yield signs are red because you need to pay attention to their message. Otherwise, you may end up in a car wreck or running over a whole troop of Girl Scouts! I was going back and forth between black and white accents, but, as luck has it, I was working on the color scheme for the Alien sign in a separate window of Photoshop. One of the color schemes looked like the green sign you see above and I already had the spider sign done. Suddenly it was so obvious and the whole project fell into place. I know that if I saw this sign I would do one of two things: 1) turn around or 2) check that all my guns were loaded, within reach and step on the accelerator. Which reminds me, I still need to look into getting a gun...

I actually have a second picture of them in a vertical arrangement. It was really a coincidence that the colors ended up being green, yellow and red. It was even more of a coincidence that the only vertical arrangement that looked balance was to put them red, yellow and green from top to bottom. However, I don't like to be thought of as a copy cat and I know my classmate Yee is doing her 3 circle signs in the arrangement seen on intersection lights. I don't want to steal her thunder, or her idea, so I will keep them in the horizontal arrangement... Or maybe I should just ask Yee which way is better... I don't know, I'm just glad to have them complete.

I suppose that's it for now. I have to get back to my Metalworking homework now. It's not nearly as fun, but it must get done. Until next time!

Two Posts in One Day? What is Going On?!

Very brief post, mainly to show off my first completed design project. The project is known as the 'Black Square Problem' and apparently is a project all design majors will encounter. We were given 6 adjectives and required to create a picture that would convey that adjective or emotion by using only 4 black squares. I actually posted the initial designs on Facebook to gauge how accurate I was and only ended up changing one at the advice of my instructor.

I'll go ahead an post the image first if you would like to take a guess, but don't scroll to far because the adjectives and reasoning are listed below.

It's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but I reworked one design, tweaked another and ended up having to completely redo three of them because they had glue spots on them. The adjective are shown left to right, top to bottom as follows:

Ordered
This one is relatively easy to convey. The first design was just four equal boxes forming a larger box shape. Then, I moved on to something that looked like the Purina logo. However, after reading a few of the synonyms for this word, I went with the design you see because it shows motion. It's almost as if they are coming off of an assembly line, all the same and orderly.

Increase
This one was the one the instructor suggested changing, mainly due to the other mostly black design that was the odd man out. The first design started with a small square in the bottom left hand corner. The other three became larger and larger as they moved up to the top right in an arc resembling a parabola. His words were that we were going to see a lot of similar designs and that I should try to use the negative space to show the word. I kind of cheated because I had no idea what to do. By cheating I mean that I googled the word 'increase' and looked at the image results. I saw a whole bunch of arrows and that is when the design you see now came to me.

Bold
This one gave me the most trouble. At first I wanted to use a large square next to a small one, but that didn't quite do it for me. This design was initially an idea for Increase, but when Josh said it made him think of 'adventure' I started thinking about it in a different way. Some people see it as tumbling or falling down a hill, but the bouncing motion created is supposed to convey boldly charging forward  and up the hill. The split responses I got on this one actually told me a bit about the person depending on which direction the squares were traveling to them... A lot more people on my Facebook are pessimists than I thought.

Congestion
Meh, I'm still not really pleased with this one. The synonyms made me think of crowding and tried to cram them into a small space. The angle was meant to make it feel more off kilter than if I had just put the square edges parallel to the frame edges. I don't know, could have been better.

Tension
This one gave me trouble at first, but as soon as I sketched this idea down, I knew it was the one. Tension can be seen a couple different ways. While many of my classmates were viewing it as the physical tension like you would see in a rope, I immediately went to the emotion behind the word. Tension is very negative and I associate many synonymous feelings with it like stress, anxiety, pressure, depression, etc. So, it's meant to be seen as the serene calm of the dark being cracked harshly causing a sort of sting that could be perceived as large or small..

Playful
I got a lot of really good synonyms on this one. Words like bouncy, floating, fun, and others were used by my friends on Facebook. These are all positive and upbeat feelings I wanted associated when looking at this design.

There you have it, finished design project numero uno. It gave me small fits of grief throughout the process, but over all it was pretty fun. Our next project is going to be about balance, but for now, I must study for our design quiz tomorrow. Thanks for checking in!

Fall Semester Week 1... And so it BEGINS!!

Week one of my new scholarly endeavors has already proven to be a blast. I'm taking a very interesting art history class on non-western art in Africa, Oceania and the Americas. I haven't learned a whole lot yet, but I've only had two class periods so far. After that, I have a quick trot over to Ellis Hall where I'm taking my Metalworking & Jewelry class. So far, this is proving to be one of the more tedious classes.

Don't get me wrong, I love to make jewelry (I've actually been doing it for almost a decade now) so it's very nice to learn about techniques and medium I have very little experience with. However, think about it as if you were independently wealthy and owned 4 high end sports cars. Sure, you don't really dislike any of them (otherwise you'd be an idiot for spending so much on them), but you have your favorites. Hence, one of those awesome cars is going to be at the bottom of the list.

Right now we're working on a small layered project with brass, copper and nickel. It's mainly been tedious because we have to take 10 different magazine clippings and do 4 design evolutions (each) on top of the simplified tracing of the image itself. If you add that up, it's 10 tracings and 40 drawings. I get the idea of practicing and trying a bunch of different things, but I've already picked the one I want to do, so it's been difficult making myself complete the other 20+ evolutions I have left. No biggy, I plan to make quick work of them tonight.

Once I've completed the first half of my day, I then have to trek back to the car and take a little trip downtown for my two studio classes. The third class of the day is Two Dimensional Design. To my understanding, we will only be working with abstract images (hence the word 'design' in the class name). For example: our first project is the classic 'Black Square Problem'. We were given a list of 6 adjectives and our job is to creatively use 4 black squares to convey the emotion the word evokes. I'm happy with 2 or 3 of my designs so far, but I need to pay that project some extra attention tonight and tomorrow as we are turning it in at the end of class Tuesday.

And finally, once I take a brief one hour break following 2D Design, there is what is already my favorite class. I took a drawing class or two in high school, but it has been so long that I forgot how much I enjoyed honing my talent. Drawing I one is the last class of the day for me and is by far the most enjoyable class. No homework. No Tests. No wordy BS assignments. We are just drawing from life. As my instructor put it, we are learning the art of 'seeing'.

I'll admit I got really annoyed about half way through the blind draw (where you only look at the subject and not at what you are drawing), but that's because I like feedback that comes from looking at what I have done. Not too big of a deal, though, since we only did that for 30 minutes and the class is 2.5 hours long. After that, we were pretty much given free reign to draw anything we wanted in the room. I started by drawing my shoe:

Now, for anyone who might aspire to do still life work, I highly suggest that if your subject is an article of clothing make sure that it is not currently on your body. I had my leg stretched out at this angle for at least one hour before I couldn't take it anymore. My entire ass had fallen asleep and my lower back kind of felt like it was burning.

However, even with the numb butt, I was pretty proud of the improvement you see from one drawing to the other. The shoe on the left was the first attempt. With this one I sort of haphazardly started drawing. Of course I was becoming annoyed with the inaccurate proportions I could see and it is very difficult to effectively remove charcoal from newsprint. So, I started again and did quite a bit more planning before adding detail. Gently sketching out the prominent shapes I saw first allowed for a better skeleton for which to add the shoe details on later.

That's one hour I spent on drawing my foot, but what did I do with the last hour of class? Well, the instructor had set up a still life for the blind draw that consisted of a couple plants, animal skulls and a tussled table cloth. I decided to have some fun with the table cloth:

Now, he only wanted us to do line work, but I, again, was getting bored so I disregarded such instructions and let loose with some shading. I haven't used charcoal in so long that I had forgotten how dynamic the lines and shading can be. Sure, you can't keep a charcoal pencil as needle sharp as a graphite pencil, but when use effectively, charcoal can do what graphite cannot.

To wrap this up I will go ahead and say that I can tell this is going to be an amazing semester. I know this because I have only had two days of class and I'm already chomping at the bit to get back on Tuesday. I guess that means that I might be addicted to art...

That's right, I'm addicted to art. Say what you will, but I need it and there's nothing you can do to keep us apart. Now, hand me a tourniquet so I can shoot up with creativity, 'kay?