Dot-line Project

This project consisted of using circles and lines to interpret different words in our own way. We had to deeply think of how to show the word without including any kind of text. It was pretty nerve racking because I could arrange the dots and lines in a certain way that would make sense to me but another person could easily not understand what word was being shown. In general, this project helped me to improve my abstract compositions since that is not one of my strong suits.

Gestalt is the main figures, colors and other elements that we first see when we look at a glimpse of a picture. When we look quickly at a picture, we tend to see figures and ground. We have to notice how they relate to one another, it also includes similarity and anomaly, continuation, closure and proximity. All these elements are different ways in which we can describe our pieces of artwork. Gestalt relates to this project by having to use only a certain number of figures in our pictures. For example, we needed to pay attention to how to arrange our figures since we could not have lines that would overlap each other. We needed to be able to make patterns which would make the viewer interpret the word correctly. For the word “rejection”, the majority of people were using proximity with the majority of the figures to show how one figure was being rejected.

Personally at home, it is not that difficult to do well crafted work because I feel comfortable at my desk in my room. But at school it is a bit harder for me since I have to use new tools and get used to having people around me when I work instead of being alone. It is difficult in general, I have to be more careful since the glue gets everywhere and anything that I do wrong gets a stain on the paper. When I start projects, I want to finish them quickly because I want to see the end product already. At times I also like to take my time to have a peaceful process.

It was somewhat difficult to represent ideas without illustrating them because I had to think of ways to express what I wanted to say without actually saying the word. It was sort of like learning a new language because I had to make my own expressions to communicate the word in English in a different way.

Rejection Terror

I have never liked abstract art. I just think it looks weird and does not have any kind of shape. But after doing this project I realized that abstract art can be as simple as some lines and dots together. Our pieces of artwork looked simple and I liked them which made me change my idea of abstraction.

I might use this exercise to do new artwork at home because I have learned a new way to express myself and be able to also interpret different forms of abstract art. Now looking back at my notes I can also use the 5 different Gestalt theories to be able to describe artwork in a different way in the future.

Comfort

To figure out how I should place my shapes on the paper, I sat down and played around with cut-out circles of different sizes and lines of different widths. I would move them around and decide if it was a good representation of the word. For “terror” I felt that the big circles would be a great choice because it is scaring off the small line on the bottom right corner. For “comfort” I decided to use two circles and two lines. Each line guards their circle because they are the same color making the circle comfortable with its own kind. For “rejection” the group of black circles is chatting because they are friends since they are all the same color but would reject the tiny gray circle just because it was different.