Black and White Study

This particular project was extremely time consuming. We were asked to take a masterwork from art history and re-paint it in a black and white study. The objective was to see what effect color has on the original piece and also to study the compositional structure. In this piece, there's a strong sense of diagonality and use of triangles.

You can see that it transfers well in black and white. I think value, more than color, is what really makes the image stand out and gives the figures a multidimensional feel.

This masterwork was originally done by Leon Kelly, an american surrealist.

Here is the process from start to finish:

My final design

Original painting
"Radioactive Human Residue"
1961

Letter as Image

For this project we were asked to use two different letters of the alphabet in any readable font to create a design. We could repeat the letters as often as we wanted but had to use at least four gradations of value between black and white in our designs.

I chose the letters "G" and "Y".

This was a simple project but I found that I had a hard time coming up with ideas and thumbnails. I didn't want to use an outrageous font and I aimed to keep it simple.

While playing around with thumbnails I noticed that the "Y" kind of looked like a tree trunk and that if I shrunk other "Y"'s, they would consequently look like branches. I then arranged small "G"'s around those branches to give the sense of leaves.












For our other design, the objective was to have the letters lose their identity.
My idea was simple; I arranged the letters so that they would be behind one another in such a way that their identity was obscured. Then, to add an interesting effect, I layered them in space from largest to smallest.

The Fighting Scots!!!

This sketch was for my Drawing I class. We had gone outside for the day and set ourselves up around this new sculpture erected on campus. It was pretty difficult to draw, not only because we hadn't yet had any lectures in human anatomy, but also because the body was covered in a large, wisping mass of cloth and cape. But, prior to this we had done several exercises in class to help develop our hand-eye coordination. We were instructed to draw outlines of still lives without looking at the paper on which we drew on. Over and over again for two hours we did this. It was very difficult to master, but these exercises really helped me understand how to draw this sculpture. Since I couldn't see the structure of his frame, I utilized what I had learned through the exercises (along with measuring techniques) to accurately capture the posture and scale of the figure. 

After I had established a line drawing, I then tried to capture values. I didn't have enough time to render the image completely, but I was able to depict a general feeling of the lights and darks. 

Positive and Negative Shape

For this project I was asked to find a household object that I thought would create interesting shapes and negative shapes while also considering principles of: symmetry, scale/proportion and contrast. I then had to take the object and draw it onto paper in four different sizes and cut them out. And, with those separate cut-outs, I had created various thumbnails by mixing, overlapping and experimenting with the positive/negative space that the object displayed.

I had used a corkscrew for my designs.




This first design is fairly simple. I took all four different sized cut-outs and arranged them on the plane so that they all overlapped each other. And for any instance that they did indeed cross over into one another I reversed the value. I thought this technique created a lot of interesting shapes and negative shapes throughout the entire piece.

This next design, though similar, had a different motive behind it. I again used overlapping while reversing values. Except this time, I chose exactly where I wanted the reversal to happen. I decided to have a tight source of expressive value change at the bottom left of the picture plain. But, as your eye follows up and over to the right, the different positive and negative shapes become larger, loosening up the values. This was my attempt in depicting contrast in scale of shapes.








For this last one, I experimented with radial symmetry. It's not a complicated design, but I feel the placement of the corkscrew throughout the plane creates a lot of really interesting positive/negative shapes while giving the piece fluidity and rhythm.