Shadow Typography By: Anna Shewmaker
This project was about creating letterforms from the shadows our bodies create, it was designed to get me thinking about letters and how letters are formed, as well as the anatomy of letters.
At first we stood in front of a light and took pictures of our shadows, this was an interesting exercise because it was hart to figure out how to position ourselves so that the desired letter was created. We then took pictures of the shadows, this caused for some interesting thicknesses in the letters because in order to get the picture but not create an overlapping shadow or have my bodies in the frame I had to stand off to the side. This caused one side of the letter to be much thinker than the others.
After I had taken the photos I printed them off and traced them using a light board, because of the organic nature of our bodies the letters were jagged and bumpy. To me this looked like stalagmites in caves and I sought to emphasize the ridges and in some places create more rather than smooth them out.
After I had originally traced the letters they were too far apart and uneven. So on a new sheet of paper I traced them again only this time instead of directly tracing them I moved the paper around after each letter to create an even base line and cap height as well as a even kern between the letters.
Once I was happy with the shape and spacing of the letters it was time to fill them in with sharpie and scan them to the computer.
After the letters were scanned to the computer and placed in InDesign I noticed that the sharpie was not as well defined and not an even black across all the letters, I really did not like this so to fix it I used the “pencil” tool to trace the letters again and fill the shape with black.
After making the letters more black it was time to identify and highlight the anatomy of the letter forms, because my name only had two letters and that were mad up of mostly diagonal lines it was a very simple anatomy chart, I decided to use the color blue to highlight the anatomy. To create the highlighted parts I again used the “pencil tool.” However it was pointed out in critique that perhaps the chart was too simple so I decided to spice things up.
Here some of the charts made by others that i used as insperating for my chart. I also took some of the ideas I saw during the critiquie and made them my own.
This is what the final piece turned out as, taking all the ideas from other anatomy charts and what I saw and heard in group critique
This project was both easy and hard, hard because of the amount of work to do and how to take all the ideas that inspired me and create them into one final piece with out looking like it was directly copied. However it was also easy because my first name is very simple and did not need a lot of work in the beginning to come up with shadow ideas and it was easy to figure out spacing on the pages.