Changing My Perspective On Art:A Journey through Introduction to Design

Created by Marissa Elliott

The Dot/Line project required us to build thoughtful and abstract compositions. We had to choose four words from a list that was given to us. We made countless thumbnails for our iterations in our sketch book. I have included some examples of those thumbnails on this page.

During this project I learned how difficult and frustrating it can be to cut and glue. This really changed my perspective on handmade art. I had no idea how hard it was to make a well crafted piece of work. I had to spend a lot of extra time to fix all of my crafting errors. I’m happy I put the extra time in, however, because I would rather spend extra time to get small details right than to rush through it. This project has taught me to appreciate the amount of time it takes to finish a piece of artwork, even if it looks simple it required a large amount of work.

This project also changed my perspective on abstraction because I am now more understanding of it. Before this class I thought abstraction wasn’t really art and was kind of pointless. Now, I disagree with that point-of-view. Through Gestalt and other examples, I learned how to figure out what works effectively at conveying a certain emotion or feeling to an audience. Abstraction is actually very hard to do effectively.

Dot/Line Project

Scarcity

Oppression

These are the finished products from the Dot/Line project.

Longing

Exhaustion

During this project we learned how letters can impact how we perceive the meaning of the word. We experimented with many different lettering and made many iterations in our sketch book. We had to choose one word and make four different iterations of it.

Hand lettering communicates much differently than digital letters because it has more personality to it. I learned that hand lettering can be done in a wide variety of ways. Very small changes to lettering can alter the whole emotion that the word gives off. I didn’t know before this project that so much relied on how lettering looks. I drew many rough drafts of my words and letters before I figured out which ones worked the best. I also learned that you can play with continuation and the negative/positive space to give more meaning to the hand lettering.

Hand Lettering

Above are examples of the many iterations of hand lettering that I drew in my process book.

Here are my final images for the word “tear.”

This project required us to translate/transform the content of a selected object/animal. The animal I choose was a flamingo. Our work also had to communicate cleary while also representing our object uniquely.

Through this project I learned that flamingos are very iconic. People vould recognize that I was drawing a flamingo just from drawing a long neck on a body with skinny legs. This helped me in my illistrations because it helped me figure out how much of the flamingo I could take out while still being able to tell it was a flamingo.

The medium that I thought was most challenging duirng this project was the geometric shapes. I struggled with trying to create an image with geometric shapes that still resembled a flamingo. I thought that the most enjoyable medium was the blind continuous line drawings because I had never done that before. Blind continuous line drawings are when the artist doesn’t look at the paper and doesn’t pick up their drawing utinsel. Below is an exmple of my blind continuous line drawing of a flamingo. I also learned how to use Photoshop during this project. I had never used it before so it was a big step for me to be able to edit images digitally.

Object Iteration

These images are before and after I edited them digitally.

Below is the first flamingo iteration I did and on the next page it is my final version.

The children’s book project was a very interesting project. We were paired with teacher education students so we had to learn to collaborate with another person. My partner was difficult to reach so I never ended up meeting with her. This taught me that when working with a client they won’t always be cooperative. However, she was open to changing the text around which was very helpful so I appreciated that.

This project changed my perspective on Photoshop. I was very frustrated in the beginning of this class when I first started using it. Eventually, I was able to successfully create and edit images digitally. I was very proud of my new ability to edit digitally and now I have a greater appreciation for digital artwork.

I thought the most challenging part of this project was coming up with designs that could be done in a short amount of time but still look well done. If I could do this project over I would have done more rough drafts of it to see what it would look like when it is printed.

Children’s Book

Here are images before and after I digitally edited them.

We use our earsto hear sounds.

Some words we can use to describe the things we hear areloud, quiet, squeaky, and creaky.

We can hear people talk,the birds chirping,

and music

To the left is my very first rough draft of my children’s book. I struggled with Photoshop so I had to spend extra time learning how to edit photos. There is a very big difference in quality of work from the beginning of this project to the final of this proj-ect. On the bottom is the final outcome of this page. I kept the continuous motion of the music notes but dropped out the colored background, the bird, and the mouth. I replaced those images with one image of a side profile view of an ear.

Here are a few sample pages from my finished children’s book.

Some words we can use to describe the things we see are

tall, blue, small, and round.

We use our eyes to see

different things. We can see

pictures, animals, and teachers.

Smell Hearing

Sight Taste

TouchWe have 5 senses.

We use our mouth to taste

things.

Some words we can use to describe the things we taste are

bitter, sour, spicy, and fruity.

We can taste pickles, oranges, and hamburgers.

We use our hands to touch

things.

Some words we can use to describe the things we touch are

cold, hard, wet, and rough.

We can touch our pillow, pencil,

and our shoes.

Here is a picture of me holding the final printed copy of the children’s book that I illustrated.

Introduction to DesignProfessor Katherine Ries

St. Norbert CollegeFall of 2014