Emily Techmeier ART 130 Fall 2013
These books are called “process books” because they are truly just that - a process, full of struggles and victories. This book shows it all, not just the polished finished product. Proof that perfection doesn’t come on the first try.
DOT LINE This was our first project, intended to bring us to the basics and give us building blocks for later projects. We learned about negative space, spatial relations, and abstract thinking by using cut-out circles and rectangles (dots and lines) to try to create a word purely abstractly. The only two values available were black and gray, and the background was a white square.
The part of this project that I struggled the most with was avoiding my tendency to illustrate instead of think abstractly. I walked into class on the first day after we were supposed to start brainstorming with all sorts of illustrations, as shown on the next page. It wasn’t until after I was scolded that I even began to understand what was meant by “abstract thinking.”
These iterations are all for the word “freedom.” Freedom made me think of America, so many are pictures of things associated with America. Because of the fact that freedom was my first word, after subtracting out the illustrative words, there were less non-illustrative iterations for it, as shown on the next page.
gun/war
equality
balloon
baseball
flag
jail
apple
baseball diamond
WORD ITERATIONS In this project, we got to expand on the essence of dot/line and actually use the word we were trying to represent in our iterations. We had to create a word map, as modeled on the next page, in which we had to come up with things associated with our word. From there, we had to use those ideas to form representations of our word.
This was the first draft of my word map. There are many parts of it that I didn’t use, and there were some things I added for the final draft on the next page.
jumprope
record
S K miss time
rocks flowers
frolic
I P sidewalk
hopskotch shoe
RED Pandas... in Grayscale?
For this project, we had to pick an object or animal to represent in multiple styles. We had five different styles to cover: - Continuous line - We experimented with blind (no looking), semi-blind (only looking while not drawing) and normal continuous line drawings. All were a challenge because it isn’t instinct to not pick up your pen. - Geometric - We had to use only geometric shapes to represent our object. I chose to use paper and cut out my geometric shapes to piece the animal together. - Master artists - We had to choose two master artists and model our representations of our animal off of a work of theirs. On the next page, I have included the works that inspired my designs. - Collage - We were to cut out pieces from magazines and piece together our object. - Typography - We had to use letters or chunks of text to create our object. This task was especially hard for me and most of my pieces just ended up looking like the collage pieces.
The challenge of this project was to look at an object and decide how to simplify it by identifying its key components. This was pretty easy to do with the red panda because it has distinct facial markings and a ringed tail. However, the one thing I didn’t account for picking my object was that we were working in black and white. When you remove the red color from the red panda, it becomes harder to tell it apart from animals like raccoons and cats.
Red pandas are about the size of the average house cat, and live in the mountains of Nepal.
LEWITT
SOL
GEOMETRIC
JOAN
MIRÓ
COLLAGE & TYPOGRAPHY
CONTINUOUS LINE DRAWING
TUTORIAL:
HOW TO MAKE A PEPPERONI PIZZA
In this project, we had to make a visually appealing step-by-step tutorial on a task of our choosing. We were instructed to think of our design being a two-page magazine spread. Our only strict design criteria were that we could only use up to three colors.
I was apparently very hungry when I chose my topic, because pizza was the first thing that popped into my mind.
These drawings, seen on my final composition, were ones that I cut out and crafted by hand for my first draft and then scanned in to edit for the final draft.
I really enjoyed this project because I got to use my crafty skills, my organizational skills, and further develop my skills with editing software. This project was very well received by my peers and gave me a lot of confidence in my design skills. It also helped me see that sometimes suggestions from others aren’t always better than my own ideas. For my final draft, I changed the pie-shaped number bullets to be rotating around, per suggestion after seeing my first draft. However, when it came time to critique my final draft, everyone agreed that my original design worked better.
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CALL TO
ACTION
GO
tell the world
Take the gospel where Christ is not known. Did you know that there are people who have never even heard the name JESUS? If they’ve never even heard of Him, how can they know the amazing sacrifice He made for them? YOU have the power to bring the life-changing story of Jesus Christ to the ends of the earth.
GO.
JESUS Film Mission TripsTM offers more than 40 shortterm mission trips each year to Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Go online to find out more about where God might be calling YOU.
www.jesusfilmmissiontrips.org
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Jesus Film is a ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ that aims to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ to the world. They have created a video, the Jesus Film, that has been translated into more than 1,160 languages, with new languages being added monthly. The Jesus Film Mission Trips, advertised by my posters, bring willing people on trips to the areas where the Jesus Film is shown. They experience firsthand just how powerful it is to bring the message to a people group that has probably never heard of Jesus, let alone his story, which is depicted in the film based on the Gospel of Luke.
This project was to design a poster for a cause. It sounded easy enough until I found out I couldn’t use anything but typography. Why couldn’t I use pictures? They always draw people in! However, that wasn’t the point of the assignment. First, we had to pick a cause. From there, we had to find an organization that supported the cause and advertise for them. We were instructed to make one portrait and one landscape poster, both using only typography and no more than 2 colors.
GO
tell the world
Take the gospel where Christ is not known.
Did you know that there are people who have never even heard the name JESUS? If they’ve never even heard of Him, how can they know the amazing sacrifice He made for them? YOU have the power to bring the life-changing story of Jesus Christ to the ends of the earth.
GO.
JESUS Film Mission TripsTM offers more than 40 short-term mission trips each year to Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Go online to find out more about where God might be calling YOU.
www.jesusfilmmissiontrips.org
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The biggest design challenge of this project was figuring out how to get my point across in as few words or phrases as possible. I had to try to catch a person’s eye and then keep their attention long enough to say what I need to say. Another problem I had was coming up with a narrow enough cause and solution to make a poster on. As much as I wanted to just say “So many people don’t know Jesus- get the message out in any way you can!”, I couldn’t. I had to narrow down to a certain organization that targets a certain group of people to share the Gospel with.
GO
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I played around with many different layouts for both the vertical and horizontal posters. I planned many different possibilities and I still ended up changing the layout multiple times before really coming to a conclusion. I found it was much different once the text was actually on the page rather than just looking at it as blocks of text like I had illustrated.
I also played around with “Bring the gospel to the world” as the second part of my title in order to help people know exactly what the poster was about just from the title. However, my peers and I ended up agreeing that “Tell the world” was much more effective and less wordy. Because of this, I decided on “Take the gospel where Christ is not known” as my subtitle. This quote is Jesus Film’s slogan, so I figured that would tie the organization in nicely as well as get directly to my point.
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Computer Science and Graphic Design Connect Four
Our final computer science project was to create the graphic interface for a game. The game logic’s code was provided for us, but we had to make it into something a user could understand and use like a normal computer game.
This project combined both computer logic and design logic. There were certain design things I couldn’t accommodate with my computer skills, and there were certain computer skills that I wanted to use but couldn’t figure out how to make them look good designwise. Finding something that exhibited both skill sets was a big challenge.
The game board is composed of 42 of these boxes, although it appears to all be one piece. Each square can have its own background color, and is designed to have the gray middle be transparent, so the background color can show through. The background color is what gets changed when a chip gets dropped in, so it appears that there is a circle of that color on the board.
Final Thoughts Looking back on the semester, I realize that I was almost too quick to give up on this class. I had a very hard time feeling like I was succeeding at the Dot/ Line project, and assumed the whole class would be the same type of abstract, “touchy-feely” design. After turning in my final composition for the Object Iterations (red pandas) project, however, I began to feel my confidence rising. People were understanding my work and were actually liking it. Not only did everyone else seem to like it, but I was happy with my own work. The next few projects came much easier to me and I found myself really enjoying them. The skills I’ve learned from these projects are truly invaluable and I feel like I have a much better grip on “design.” This became the class that I enjoyed coming to and looked forward to in my week instead of dreading and stressing about. Those feelings helped me realize I’m on the right path with including design in my future.
Emily Techmeier 2013