OBJECT ITERATIONS

Obeject iterations

Left: I wanted to get a feel for the great-horned owl in my own style so I drew this to get warmed up and inspired.

Right: Blind-Contour and continuos line drawings end up ridiculously funny looking, but are a great practice tool!

This project was our chance to think broadly about the object we chose before thinking deeply. We were to be experiment with a wide variety of media that would effectively show the essesence of our object. I had chosen the Great-Horned Owl as the subject of my project. I wanted to gather as much information as I could on the creature from where its natural habitat were to what the owl symbolized in different cultures. Collecting images of the creature was next because I had to see what the owl looked like in different poses. Taking notes of all the major characteristics helped because it helped distinguished the great-horned owl from other owls and would help in expanding my knowledge of the owl.

Left: Owl feathers were worn by the Native American doctors and were a way to ward off sickenss, I really wanted to use the dream catcher because those are said to capture bad dreams and bring good ones.

Right: Collages were not easy, but this was one of the last iterations I made and I think it was one of my best works.

The process started with continuos line drawings, I chose one pose specifically to work with this, but I also did the technique with other poses and got interesting results. The continuos line techinque got easier as I kept practicing. For chosing 2 master artists where we have to copy their style I had chosen, Banksy and Kathe Kollwitz. Banksy was a spray paint artist. I had worked with spray paint privously and I wanted to explore it further. Kathe Kollwitz was a artist who worked with charcoal and had very sharp and defined lines to show her work. I had wanted to use a clay scratch board to really show the sharpness of her work, but there were no materials avialable with the time that was allowed so charchoal was the media used instead. Collages was a media I have rarely used, so creating an owl from different magazine pages was interesting, but took a lot of time. The typographic collage was difficult because I wanted to use text that if someone read would be related to nature. Like the collages, this took a lot of time and effort to ensure that the final product was clean and looked pleasant. For the geometric iteration, I decided to use he technique of oragami. I gathered nature magazines since the sheets are thin like oragami paper and did a lot of folding. Working with Photoshop on this project was a new experience because while I have used Photoshop in the past it was a very very old version of it. I learned the key commands and will continue to use those. I learned more about curves, that I did not understand before. If I had to continue with the Great-Horned Owl I would like to experiment more with more iterations with different mediums. I would like to continue working with different ways to pose the owl and new ways that I could portray it.

When I was designing this I had no real plan in mind. I put the images into the Indesign document and would move them if it did not look right. I did know that I wanted the dream catcher to be one of the main images as well as the owl sitting on the tree branches. I made those two bigger than the rest so that would become that main focus. I placed borders on everything except for the two larger images thinking that they were needed. During the in-process critque it was suggested that the flying owl in the top right corner and the bottom right corner should not have boarders. I experiemented placing the boarders on different images and worked on deciding what looked the best. I knew that I liked the idea of 3 geometric images, but with varying elements. It was proposed that the elements should be closer together and leave more negative space for the rest of the images to ‘breath’.

I wanted to see what I could create geometricly if I drew it instead of the oragami piece I had. This was my first attempt at the spray paint. It was not until it was dry that I realized that there was nothing connecting the feather to the main pat of the dream catcher.

The final product layout was drastically changed from the in-process critque layout, but I think this flows much nicer.

I changed a lot from the in-process critque to the final product. The first major change was the layout. I spend a large amount of time moving images and changing sizes. I still wanted the main focus to be the dream catcher and the owl sitting on the tree branches so they are bigger in size, but to keep the balance I needed an image to be larger in the bottom right corner. It was decided, through the help of my family too, that the image in the bottom right should be the collage of the owl sitting on the post without a boarder. I changed the geometric images to be the oragmi owls placed in trees and bushes. They made smaller so that the three can be close together an leave some negative space for the rest of the itrations. The two top corner images do not have boarders on them because it allows the white space around it to be its whole background rather than constricting it. This was greatly improved from the in-process piece because it has more flow rather than just images on the page.

This was the geometric oragami piece I decided to come back to, but here I just put it on the scanner and inverted the coloring.

17 Here is the geometric oragami piece, but placed in a tree and added brightness. I liked this iteration, but the inverted coloring of the same image had more impact so it was used in the final product.