I'm tired because I slept 14 hours.

#finalsweek

process Book 2014Taylor Biese

When I signed up for this class, I thought it was going to be like my past art classes. But I was very wrong. I had to think a lot more about why I did certain things and less about making my creations perfect. When it came to Photoshop, I got frustrated very easily because I wasn't very familiar with the program and there was always a time crunch. This class made me think abstractly, which i realize now, I didn't do much of in high school. I definitely need to learn a lot more about design, but I am still an art major.

Dot LineGestalt is a picture that can be perceived in many ways because there are hidden meanings in the work. I am kind of a perfectionist when it comes to certain tasks. I would rather spend a lot of time on a project and be proud of my work than do a fast, crappy job and question myself. I enjoy big projects. Since this project was a small, simple project, I had no problem working quickly and making multiple interpretations. My idea of abtraction before this project was a lot of geometric shapes and patterns, but we were encouraged to use the least amount of dots and lines.. FOr certain words, it was very hard to get them acros without using illistrations. For example, I kept thinking teeter-totter when thinking of a way to represent the word stability. My favorite part of this project was the simplicity. We were limited on shapes and colors. Because it was so limited, a lot of people ended up having very similar interpretations. Overall, this project really got me in the “art mood“ because I never thought of art in this way before. I was always given a project that was more open-minded. Making thumbnails and trying out many different ways before creating the project was very new to me. It took longer to figure out what I was going to do for this project than it did to make them, but I suprisingly enjoyed it.

Final Products

Rejection

Scarcity

Dot Line

Stability

Oppression

Hand Lettering

Just like different fonts, hand lettering definitely communicates differently than digital letters. I ended up experimenting more with the entire word itself than the actual letters. When there were two of the same letters in the word, they didn't look the same, but it was also adding character to the word. Plus, the possibilities were endless compared to the small variety Microsoft Word offers. I learned that I am very good at cursive handwriting and anything that needs to look girly. On the second day of the hand lettering project, I tried to work more with boxes and making things look 3-D, and I did better than I thought I would! The hardest part of the project for me was figuring out what word to do next. Since we were never given a specific word to use in the beginning, I ended up scanning my room for another idea. I wish we were given more of a variety of words to work with. But then again, in the future, I may be given one word and need to make multiple (different) interations of it. I think i could hand letter pretty big. I'm not really sure when I would need to use huge letters, but my first thought, when asked this, was graffiti. But, I am not a bad-ass so that will probably never happen.

Object Iterations

Alberto Giacometti

The object iterations were really fun in my opinion. I liked playing around with a whole bunch of different materials. My insperation for choosing the cow was because I grew up on a farm and cows are literally my life. My life would be hell without them. plus, we were still working in black nad white so a cow seemed suitable. My favorite iteration would either have to be the top left one in the poster or the one right below it. The most challenging part of this project had to be finding certain parts of the cow that make it look like a cow. For example, in one of my iterations, all I had to do was add the silouhette of a cows head and that was good enough. I think I got a bit too carried away with editing the photos in Photoshop, but all in all, I really liked making art with cows. The artist I chose for inspiration was Alberto Giacometti. He makes a lot of his animals look sick and not fed. Since one very important trait for a cow is its big body, I found it a bit difficult to make a cow resemble his work. In the end, I think it looks like his work and I can still tell that it is a cow.

Final Poster

Children's Book

The Children's Book was the most fun for me, yet the most challenging. I spent hours and hours putting it together. I think it took so long because I have never used Photoshop before. The night I will never forget was spending two hours trying to figure out why the picture I saved wasn't showing up as transparent in InDesign. After two hours of frustrtion and yelling at the computer screen, I found out I had to mark one little check box when I saved the picture. I really liked how we are given text for a children's book and we were allowed to do whatever we wanted, as long as it suite the book. With this project, we had a lot more options and possibilities. If I had to do this project differently, I would have made my pages as one picture in Photoshop and then moved it to InDesign. This is beause in my document on InDesign, I couldn't get the boxes seleted correctly and it was hard trying to arrange all of the individual pictures on the page. My sources of inspiration were the runner ducks that were at my hometown fair this summer. I decieded to use runner ducks because they were extremely cute nd different. I also wanted my objects to be textured so I thought, the simplest way to do that is to use markers. They were vibrant and they were at hand. As soon as I strated messing around with markers, I thought it was going to be super fun, so I went with it! Afer looking at it, I am really happy with the style I chose because it gives the book a lot more color.

On the far side of the pond, near the open field,

There lived a family of ducks.

These ducks were no ordinary ducks, no, no, no.These ducks lived in a house,

a tiny house by the shore.

Mama Duck and Daddy Duck, they were so in love.

They had three little ducklings, Marsha, Dewey, and Arnold.

“I went to the other side of the pond, I was swimming really fast, and then all of a sudden. . .“

I saw him. He was so big. And green. And scaly. It was so cool!

Arnold's parents didn't like this. They were worried about him.So they told him to finish his dinner and to go to his room.

“No more adventures for you, young man,“ said Mama Duck.“You need to learn to be safe.“

Introduction to DesignFall 2014

Taylor Biese