MY LINE IS EMO ADM Y1S1 Foundation 2D
Instructor: Shirley Lim Aug-Sep 2016
CONTENTS
MARKMAKING EXPERIMENTS violent concealment panic relief overwhelmed surprise curious longing! shock ! ILLUSTRATIVE EXPERIMENTS amusement! hostile! loneliness! TEXTURAL EXPERIMENTS disoriented! Infatuation! Wounded!
celebratory! gladness! grief!
“A line is a dot that went for a walk”
When seeking unique and interesting ways of creating lines to illustrate our selected emotions, experimental mark making proved to have been a good starting point. !
These three mediums were applied in a variety of methods and tools, and on different qualities of paper. !
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MARK MAKING
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The primary mediums used for my basic mark making experiments were Chinese ink, Acrylic paint and Watercolor.!
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As a whole, these experiments yielded 12 emotions. !
VIOLENT Definition: involving physical force intended to hurt or damage ! !
Chinese ink on paper, applied with rubber bands
As documented in my post from my first week of mark making experiments, this final piece was achieved through applying chinese ink on paper using rubber bands. !
I scrunched up a few rubber bands into balls, dipped them in ink and rolled, pressed and rubbed them forcefully on the paper. The result created a few patches of splatters, but an overall! allusion to the emotion !
of violence with the quick, harsh marks made. In fact, the splatters may even resemble bursts of explosions, just as the notion of violence encompasses ideas of! damage, force and a sense of chaos.
PANIC Definition: sudden uncontrollable fear or anxiety, causing wildly unthinking behavior
Panic certainly involves that sense of great chaos, which I feel these prints done with thread depict in their messiness. The lines are of varying thickness, stretching out and contouring in all directions, with some twirling, thickening and others fading o due to the of ink. !
In all, it is this variety that gives the piece its sense of chaos, and the lines which seem to be travelling in all directions mimic the idea of uncontrollable fear that results in wild behavior.!
OVERWHELMED Definition: Too strong for and overpowering one, due to the great scale or extent of something
For me, the main feature of being overwhelmed would be in the overpowering force of something. Because my fingers were printed along with the rubber bands in the resulting print, each circular form takes on a more solid, !
weighty presence. When put together in a repeated pattern as such, I found this suitable in expressing the great amount of something that can potentially overwhelm, with the circular forms
coming in and conjuring the space. A more indepth documentation of this process can be found in my post on mark making in OSS. !
CURIOUS Definition: Eager to know or learn something
In picking this emo6on, I immediately drew a link between curiosity and a journey. Curiosity o?en fuels a journey of discovery, and I felt this experimental print done with a single line of thread appropriately illustrates this.
The line is thick at parts and thin at others, and contours in a never-ending line. It seems like it’s going somewhere, and while its des6na6on is unclear, its journey is traced beau6fully through this line. I really like how the thread captures the most subtle twists and turns.
SHOCK Definition: A sudden upsetting or surprising event or experience, causing disturbance
With this piece, I aimed for it to resemble hair standing on ends. I dripped splotches of India ink on paper and using a straw, begun blowing the ink with a quick burst of air to get it to spread far and in dierent directions.!
I was careful to maintain disturbance to the control over where the order of the neater ink spreads, ensuring horizontal line. ! everything went upwards to create the element of surprise. UniďŹ ed by a neater horizontal line that spreads across the strip, the upward lines are meant to be the
CONCEALMENT Definition: hiding or preventing something from being known
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When I first chose to experiment with acrylics, I wanted to do something with thick acrylic paint, similar to impasto. ! With this technique in mind, I initially chose to express loneliness with lines formed by thick paint, using Vincent Van Gogh as a reference. !
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Van Gogh’s wheatfields series utilize thick paint applied in dierent directions, and dealt with themes of loneliness. Thus I felt such a technique could allude to that emotion.
After experimenting and eventually ending up with this piece, I realized that the lines I created seemed to weave in together, almost like it was trying to hide or conceal something behind. Furthermore, the elimination of color in this project makes me pay extra attention to the crisscrossed directions of the lines. The texture of the paint, which stands out in relief, gives the pattern as a whole more structure. This only strengthens the idea of the pattern being a wall that seems to hide something, and thus, I found concealment to be the apt emotion for this piece.!
RELIEF Definition: The feeling of reassurance and relaxation following release from anxiety or distress.
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I approached the emotion of relief in relation to its contrasting emotion – panic/anxiety. Once again using acrylic paint, I spread the paint thickly with a palette knife.! Using white to represent that relief upon release from anxiety, I made this area evidently!
smoother than the textured, rough scratched surface on the black areas, meant to represent the panic in the state of distress.! !
The sudden contrast in the white abruptly placed atop the black may further allude to relief in how it’s almost breaking out of the black, highlighting a clear shift away from the state of panic.!
Initially, I tried experimenting with a soft, foam sheet and scratching on that to represent the areas of panic, but the cuts and scratches certainly did not show through as well as scratching on paint did.!
SURPRISE Definition: An unexpected or astonishing event, takes on more pleasant connotations.
Using a paleIe knife, a spread white paint across the paper and it created a nice white landscape. I played on that and while following the lines created by spreading the thick paint, used ink to create liIle outward bursts, almost like liIle flowers surprising the viewer.
The placement of the ‘flowers’ are not regular, with there being areas with no flowers at all. This follows the fact that surprises are likewise unpredictable, and do not follow a set paIern.
LONGING DeďŹ ni6on: a personal, private yearning desire for something.
It is easy to associate longing with lines that stretch out far because it illustrates the act of yearning. Ini6ally, I experimented with this dry brush technique (using a brush with liIle ink and dragging it across the paper) using black ink, but decided to invert it and use white ink on black instead because longing is private, and !
takes place internally, in the dark. It’s not an emotion that is directly visible. !
CELEBRATORY Definition: Feeling or expressing happiness and pride
I attempted for this to resemble a sprinkle of confettin, and I think it turned out rather successful. Using watercolor to give the image a softer, lighter and more pleasant feel, I used a fine brush to create pointĂŠ in a gradient, going from dark to light upwards. This gives the image that sense of uplifting emotion, appropriate to the celebratory spirit. !
GLADNESS DeďŹ ni&on: Feeling pleasure or happiness
Gladness is a relatively simple emotion, because it simply means to be happy and contented. Thus, I played on the simplicity of this emotion and likewise created a pattern that was simple, yet happy. !
Using light watercolors gave the piece a soft, approachable feel. I used a medium brush as a printing tool – dipped it in paint and started stamping on the paper. Going in outward directions was meant to reflect the state of openmindedness and openheartedness in gladness, !
and it was truly a bonus that these marks worked together and ended up forming flower-like forms, and the whole thing essentially looks like a happy garden of flowers in bloom. !
GRIEF DeďŹ ni6on: an instance of intense sorrow
While the idea of INTENSE SORROW may sound complex, I actually find it as simple as gladness was to unpack and thus, I used similar mediums. !
Intense sorrow basically means that one is very sad, and what simpler way to show that than tears? That is why I felt the washes of monochromatic watercolors would be appropriate in creating this eect of pure sadness.!
At the same time, the blotches look as though they are about to fade, and that is similar to the fact that grief is ultimately an instance of sorrow, and that instance would eventually be gone as well.!
ILLUSTR ATION
With the pieces I had done through pure experimenta6on (and a liIle bit of cleaning up a?er) in mark making, I decided that a few of these emo6ons may be beIer expressed in more wellthought, controlled methods. Thus, I went back to the mediums of pen and ink, which most of us are very comfortable with.
In these illustrative pieces, my main focus was in how strategic composition and use of lines and dots would best describe the selected emotion. !
AMUSEMENT Definition: The provision or enjoyment of entertainment.
Here, I made use of curvilinear lines to form a vibrational pattern, and this resulted in a wacky flow of a path, almost like a crazy roller coaster. I really like how the placement of these 2D lines can create the illusion of a 3D form, and that in itself is amusing to look at. !
HOSTILE Definition: Showing or feeling opposition and dislike, coldness, unfriendliness.
The concept of this piece is the idea of unfriendly neighbors, as that is the subject matter I associate with the word ‘hostility’. With a brush pen, I drew squares in an irregular fashion, creating a sense of instability – just as how hostility is the result of unstable relationships. Stacking the squares like this also made the whole thing look like a conglomeration of little dwellings, which I felt was suitable in portraying unfriendly neighbors. Within each square, I drew a circle, but notice that non of the circles are position near one another. For me, that represents coldness and intentional hostile distance. !
LONELINESS Definition: Sadness because one has no friends or company
This piece probably had the most interesting process. I looked to the idea of blind contour drawing – one of the exercises we did on our first day in 2D class. Loneliness is easy to experience but difficult to describe because it isn’t simply about being sad; it’s the lack of relationships that’s causing that sadness. !
While blind contour drawing is meant to be an observa6onal exercise, I adopted this technique, closing my eyes and thinking back to my lonely moments and drawing what I was observing internally. The final drawing comprises of a lot of downward lines, evidently reflec6ng the sadness I felt.
Thinking about those moments made me lose a bit of my grip of the pen as well. Also, the fact that this drawing was unarguably done by me alone also alludes to that sense of singularity and loneliness. In cases like these, the process was extremely key in giving the final piece more meaning.
TEXTURE Lastly, this final set comprises of pieces done with experiments on paper and layering. Playing with dierent paper materials (marker paper, newsprint, cartridge paper, watercolor paper, card, foam) allowed me to explore how adding a 3D element to the piece could help accentuate certain elements, and also how these extra collages can form shapes, dots and lines as well. !
DISORIENTED Definition: Make someone confused.
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I drew reference to the ‘abstract thought’ scene in Pixar’s Inside Out (2015), where organic forms, when disoriented, become geometric. Visually this made sense, and I employed a similar approach to this piece. I chose to cut up paper as this is physically breaking up disorienting something that was once whole.!
INFATUATION Definition: An intense but short-lived passion or admiration for someone or something
For me, the key thing about infatuation is its baselessness, how it is a sense of attraction that often occurs without rational reasoning. Thus, I wanted to use a thin fragile material to represent this, and ended up using newsprint as my medium for paper cut. !
I wanted to make use of a decorative cut pattern to represent passion and a sense of fantastical dreaminess, similar to the passion involved when one is infatuated. ! !
The fact that this was done on the thin newsprint makes it fragile, just as how this passion in infatuation is often irrational. !
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WOUNDED Definition: To hurt or injure one’s feelings.
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I picked up on the notion of hurting/injuring, and used ripped paper to represent this. I collaged layers of ripped paper, each with its own texture and color, in order to create an overall sense of disconcertion. ! When collaged around a black patch, it’s almost like a layer of skin being aggressively and forcefully ripped open to reveal something internal, just like a physical wound. Yet, what is being revealed turns out dark and black, parallel to how wounding one would mean to !
FINAL THOUGHTS open-mindedness balanced with reason
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While I am happy with how my final product turned out, I definitely think that I could have taken more risks in the experimental stage. At the same time, taking risks and going wild with experimentation would require sophisticated and thoughtful reflection as well. We cannot always rely on serendipitous experiments and instinct alone to create good work. As designers, we need to sieve out what’s most effective in helping us communicate our message, and not all yielded from our experiments are suitable for doing so.!
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This is important because after all, it is the job of an artist to seek new ways of communicating a message. ! Likewise, it is just as important to know what’s relevant and what’s not, and be comfortable with letting go of certain ideas or prototypes that simply do not serve their intended purpose. These were all encountered throughout my process in this monthlong project. ! This whole experience has taught me that perhaps the best approach to the process of art making is to keep an open mind in experimenting, and pay attention to subtleties that can potentially serve as a unique visual elements for our work. It is only through open experimentation that new, un-cliché techniques can be discovered.
SPECIAL THANKS G03 SHIRLEY LIM MY FAMILY
KOH JIE LYN U1630158L ADM 2016
“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep�
-Scott Adams