It’s All About the Process.
Jade Ruiz
This book is dedicated to my mom for always encouraging me to be creative and have fun with my art.
This book was made with the intent to show the process and work I have made in the art class Introduction to Design at St. Norbert College in the spring of 2022. I took this class as a freshman at St. Norbert, majoring in Art Education. I hope to graduate St. Norbert with a bachelors degree in Art and Eduation in order to pursue a career in teaching. I enjoyed this class and feel as though I learned a lot during my time in it. I am grateful for the education I have been gratned here at St. Norbert and look forward to the new opportunities and expereinces I will have in my next 3 years here.
Are you called to creative work? If so, how do you recognize that calling? If not, what do you feel called? I do think I am called to creative work. I enjoy thinking creatively and often apply creativity to other aspects of my life. I love working with different kinds of media and creating art. I think it is something that soothes me and allows me to be expressive and have fun. I definitely feel as though I use the creative side of my brain more than the logical, it is easier for me to think of a way to solve things creatively, than logically. I have always enjoyed activities and classes in school that focused more on creative thinking like music, art, and creative writing. My mom and older brother are also both very creative people, my mom went to school for art and my brother went to school for music and photography, so I like to think it may be a genetic thing, or just from growing up in a household that was filled with creativity. I am very grateful for the feeling of being called to creative work, and for the fact that I grew up learning how to express myself through art and music.
Dot Line The Dot Line project was designed to have students work with shapes to make an abstract composition. The project used minimal elements; gray and black cut out dots and lines. The project was done at a faster pace to encourage students to work loose and free. We learned how to use value, scale, line, and visual hierarchy to create a piece of original work. We were given a selection of different words to choose 3 from, and then were given a selection of different amounts of dots and lines we could use. We were then told to create a composition using our lines and dots in order to create 3 visual representations of our different words.
I think I learned a lot from this project. I think it was really interesting to see how people represented things differently based on how we ourselves saw them. Then during critique, it was interesting to see how different people saw the art pieces differently. Whether seeing different actions happening in the picture or different emotions represented. I never really worked with abstraction and I think I have a much more open mind about it now. I don’t think I really had a good understanding of it before.
Dot Line Reflections During this project we learned about Gestalt. Gestalt is a concept about our perception of what we are looking at. It’s our ability to see something as a whole before looking at what it’s made from. It relates to this project because when looking at the pieces we make, we first see the picture that was created, rather than first seeing the dots and lines used to make the picture. I really enjoyed learning about and practicing both of these ideas and I would love to try to use abstraction in other kinds of art that I do in my free time. I think it’s a really great way to represent emotions, like we did, without making it too obvious to those who are looking at the art. I just think that’s a really unique and personal way to make art.
I think it was difficult for me to represent ideas without illustrating them. I think most of the time when I want to represent something I go towards the idea of making an obvious visual, which is most often an illustration. It’s a lot harder to represent a feeling/emotion than other things such as physical objects. Having to represent an emotion without using illustrations was definitely hard for me. Especially as someone who has mostly only worked with painting or drawing. I feel as though it was difficult to make a “well crafted object”, and I would rather spend the extra time to get things right. I think I am a perfectionist, and I think that makes projects like this hard. It took multiple attempts to get things to a point that I was happy with. Especially the foam board. I would rather spend the extra time getting things to look how I want, rather than rushing through to get something done but have it look sloppy. I think I do get easily frustrated though and that can make wanting things to be perfect even harder.
Exhaustion
Joy
Longing
Letterforms The purpose of the letterforms project was to expose us to the idea of typography and using type as a form or expression. We got the opportunity to study typography and practice some of our own, and then got the chance to create printing letters out of linoleum. We chose a 4 letter word we wanted to represent through type, and then printed our chosen word in 4 different ways. One was straight print, one was modifying the type (letters) only, one was modifying the piece as a whole, and the last was our choice of modification.
Letterforms Reflections Throughout this project, I learned a lot about how much you can expand upon words depending on the way you present them. I learned not only about printing words and modifying them but also about different ways to represent things without directly showing a visual of them. I also learned a lot about the terms and techniques used with letter forms. I think if I were to continue to work with these letters/projects, I would love to incorporate some color into them. I think some of the pieces I saw, and some of the pieces I created, would have looked really amazing with color. I also think I would want to experiment more with the copy machine because I think there are so many different possibilities of outcomes and you can create some really unique-looking pieces.
Iterative Illustrations The iterative illustration project involved working with many different styles of art to express either an animal or simple tool. We had to research out subject and then create compositions of our animal in 6 different ways; continuous line, collage, type collage, geometric, and 2 master artist versions. These 6 different styles were meant to help us experiment with a variety of media and show us different possibilities. Our master artists’ iterations were based on another artists’ art style. We were able to choose two artists for our master artists from a list of artists provided to us.
Master Artist: Tattoo Flash
I think it was really interesting to learn more about Keith and his art, and then try to imitate it. I made several attempts to do this and was fairly happy with most of them, and ended up being really proud of the final piece.
Master Artist: Keith Haring
Different Collage Variations
Our collage pieces were created out of cut out magazines and papers, one consisted of cut out images, and the other of cut out pieces of type.
Continous Line and Geometric Iteration Continuous line iterations were when we created the subject using only one line, and not picking up our pen or pencil. This was the media that was most challenging for me .I think that I tend to be a perfectionist and I think working on a continuous line kind of goes against perfectionism. This made it a challenge for me to do this piece without trying to “fix it” afterward. Our geometric variation was created by using shapes to represent our subject, some people chose to cut out or draw shapes, and others chose to make origami.
Iterative Illustration Reflections Throughout this project, I learned a lot about both hummingbirds and the specific kind of hummingbird I chose. I learned a lot about the shape, colors, and size of different hummingbirds, their habitats and diets, and their routines and movements. I think it was really interesting to be able to explore more about an animal that I did not know much about. If I had to continue with this project I would love to explore more master artist versions. I loved learning about other art styles and by trying to work in these styles I feel like it expands the work that I do and helps me become more open-minded about trying new things. I think the most useful thing I learned by using photoshop is the editing of the background, and removing things like pencil marks or smudges. I think doing this really cleans up any piece you have and it is so simple that I feel as though I will probably do so for most pieces I upload in the future.
PSA During the PSA project, we got to create public service announcements. Public Service Announcements (PSAs) are messages distributed, for free, through commercial media to inform the public about a variety of issues, often related to health and safety. The purpose of this project was to continue working with type ot better understand how it can be an expressive form of communication. This project was also set up to help us gain experience handling type properly, learn about visual hierarchy, and learn about client - artist communication and interactions.
PSA Reflections I think this project helped me learn more about using type effectively and responding to a client’s needs. It was tough to find a layout that worked well for my project, especially because I had a large amount of information that my “client” wanted on the poster. My client did offer to shorten the type after my first draft, but in the end, I think I found a good layout that had all the information my client originally wanted. I didn’t want to take an easy way out by taking away information my client wanted in order to better fit what I wanted, and I think this is an important learning process for the future if I were to work with clients.
It was challenging to be limited to type only. I think that when we are trying to come up with an effective way to get information out, with a limited amount of space, we are often drawn to using images, especially since they are more eye-catching than words. I do think that everyone was able to do this project really well even though we were limited to only one type, but I also think it would be interesting if we had been given the opportunity to use images. I wonder how many people would have chosen to add images. I used orientation and scale to create a hierarchy by first using a larger title to draw people in. I added the relevant and interesting information in the middle, but with a smaller font size so that if people were drawn in by the title, they would come closer to the poster in order to learn more. I added books to try at the bottom of the page along with a quote, because I felt like this would be a good “end” to the poster, and encouraged them to follow the call to action of finding a good book, and reading.
Open a Book... Open your Mind. Benefits of Reading: Enjoyment - Finding a good book allows for you to be transported to adifferent world, making you think about it for days afterwards. It can help you learn new things and create new interests.
Improvement of Memory and Focus - Reading for long periods of time helps the brain learn to focus on new material. Reading books with intricate characters and plots trains the brain to remember them in the context of the story. All this repetitive intake of information helps the brain with recall.
Reduction of Stress - Sitting down to read allows your body to relax into a calmer state of mind. It creates a distraction from the outside world and can even lower things like your heart beat and blood pressure.
Don't know where to start? Try one of these books... * Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys * Caraval by Stephanie Garber * The 8th Day by Dianne K. Salerni
"Great books help you understand, and they help you feel understood." - John Green
My first draft of my PSA poster.
Open a Book, Open your Mind. Benefits of Reading: Enjoyment - Finding a good book allows for you to be transported to adifferent world, making you think about it for days afterwards. It can help you learn new things and create new interests.
Improvement of Memory and Focus - Reading for long periods of time helps the brain learn to focus on new material. Reading books with intricate characters and plots trains the brain to remember them in the context of the story. All this repetitive intake of information helps the brain with recall.
Reduction of Stress - Sitting down to read allows your body to relax into a calmer state of mind. It creates a distraction from the outside world and can even lower things like your heart beat and blood pressure.
Don't know where to start? Try one of these books... * Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys * Caraval by Stephanie Garber * The 8th Day by Dianne K. Salerni
My final PSA poster.
"Great books help you understand, and they help you feel understood." - John Green
Who Designs? The Who Designs project was the first project we did as a class, while it was not a project that required us to make art or design something, we were required to research an artist that we felt drawn to or interested in. We then had to review their art and who they were as an artist. We had to compile some of their pieces or art, and make a post about the artist and their work on Slack. It was really interesting to learn about another artist and be able to study some of their work.
Gail Anderson I was drawn to Gail Anderson because of her use of bold styles and exciting artistic choices. Anderson’s work generally includes large amounts of color which make it exciting and interesting to look at. She takes to type and lettering and turns it into really fun pieces of art that are often filled with pops of color and exciting design choices. I was also interested in learning more about Gail Anderson because she is a very inspiring woman, she is a talented artist and designer, but as mentioned she is also an educator, and a writer. Anderson has not only designed book covers but has also been a co-writer for many publications.
Jessica Walsh If I were to research another artist that was presented, I would have chosen Jessica Walsh. Her art is very unique and really eye-catching. It really isn’t like any other kind of art I’ve seen and I would love to learn more about her work and Walsh as an artist.
Image Sources • Walsh, Jessica. Jessica Walsh on Instagram Instagram, 28 Mar. 2018, https://www.instagram.com • Walsh, Jessica. “Jessica Walsh on Instagram .” Instagram, 28 Mar. 2018, https://www.instagram.com • Anderson, Nichole. “Women in Design – Jessica Walsh.” Smith Design, 10 Mar. 2021, https://smithdesign.com/blog/women-in-design-jessica-walsh/. • Anderson, Nichole. “Women in Design – Jessica Walsh.” Smith Design, 10 Mar. 2021, https://smithdesign.com/blog/women-in-design-jessica-walsh/.
What is the difference between a good life and a significant life? I feel as though a good life is one where you are happy and feel fulfilled. Your life is filled with people you care about, and you are able to spend your time doing things you enjoy. A significant life is one where you are not only happy but have also made a difference in the lives of others. A significant life is one where you have given a part of your life to helping those around you and giving them the ability to have a good life as well. I dream of having a life that is both good, and significant. I am currently majoring in Art Education. I hope to become an art teacher after graduation. The experiences I have had working with children and teaching students have been one that is really fulfilling, and I enjoy helping them learn new things. Children are so talented and smart and I enjoy helping them expand upon their ideas and dreams and helping them grow. I look forward to becoming a teacher because I do think it will help me achieve the idea of having a fulfilling and good life.
This book was made as a part of Introduction to Design at St. Norbert Collefe in the Spring of 2022. The fonts used include SimSun-ExtB, NSimSun, and SimSun.