2D Project 2 – Rhymes (Final)

INITIAL SONG CHOICE + CHALLENGES

Initially, I wanted to work on the Christmas songs, “Winter Wonderland” or “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas” as Christmas is my favourite holiday of the year and it has great significance to me as I celebrate it religiously every year. I truly enjoy the whole essence of Christmas as it brings my loved ones and I together after being away from one another through the year. Hence, my initial dingbats were based on a Christmas theme.

When we were told to change our chosen songs to rhymes, I couldn’t decide to work on either “Hickory, dickory, dock, a mouse went up the clock” or “The sailor went to sea”. I concluded that “The sailor went to sea” had more potential to play around with compositions and ideas. I think that I am a rather process driven, because most of the times I think of how I want the final outcome of the artwork to look like, what kind of style it will possess and how it flows. At the start, I intended to come up with something similar to retro nautical posters of the 1930s because the duotone effect could give the vintage feel. However, I thought that the overall style should be more of a collage, rather than a poster design. Furthermore, I felt that it was easier to create a sense of flow from the composition of collages of different stories combined.

RHYME CHOICE + CONCEPT

“The sailor went to sea, sea, sea, to see what he could see, see, see.”

was easy after doing several developmental sketches. Firstly, from a literal point of view, I came up with things that could easily represent a sailor and his life at sea (e.g. ship, coral reefs, marine life, binoculars etc., as seen in my sketches) Hence, concepts and topics like the titanic, global warming and pollution, the vastness of the sea, or a sailor and his story, came to my mind. This rhyme concentrates a lot on the word “SEE” too, so I thought that the concept could circle around this idea of what he sees on his journey. Also, after drafting out my compositions, I decided that I wanted the boat to be the key factor in connecting the four compositions together. The boat is small and simple and just in solid black to create emphasis to the contrast and vastness of the sea. The subtle placement of the ship in every piece will evoke curiosity as it’s supposed to be the main focus, yet it’s “hidden” amongst the other “happenings” in the sea.

USE OF DINGBATS

After studying Dadaism and surrealistic art, I’ve come to a conclusion that they are wacky and don’t make sense most of the times. So it was fun and exciting to come up with things that are unconventional and bizarre. I had to remind myself that the more unusual it looks, the more interesting it gets. Hence, it was rather easy to manipulate my classmates dingbats into my concepts.

COMPOSITIONS

After my discussion with Joy, she gave me some ideas of how I could make my work more intriguing. My compositions show the ship sailing the seas, (people would think that the sailor is in the ship, for the first two compositions), or could the sailor be outside of the ship? (the third and fourth compositions showed a pair of hands holding a bottle with the ship in it, were those the sailor’s hands and could he been watching it from outside it’s confinements?) I like how Dada and surrealistic art is ambiguous/ sometimes confusing and I played around with that concept through the 4 compositions. I wanted to keep it mysterious and leave the audience wanting to find out more.

The first composition illustrates the ship in the midst of danger. A lunatic spider-octopus (SPI-DOCTOPUS) sea monster is about to devour a poor little helpless puny lamb. As if the spi-doctopus wasn’t scary enough, the huge waves and strong currents made it impossible for the ship to escape this chaos. Throughout my work, I explored with a lot of layering and textures in my work. Also to add to the surrealistic feel, I mixed several styles together for example, this composition has a mix of realism, vintage etching, cartoon, pop art, not forgetting the duo tone and posterize effect, all in one.

Miraculously, the ship managed to escape the drama and was even in perfect condition! After sailing through calm waters for a day or two, the ship decides to take a rest. Beneath calm and serene waters, mutated sea creatures inhabited the polluted sea such as the BURTLE (BEAR-TURTLE) or T-EAR (lol). Untreated waste such as plastic bottles get dumped into the ocean and sea creatures can become snagged on the plastic or mistake it for food, slowly killing them over a long period of time. Also, is that the sailor underwater? Or is he just a random diver in a suit?

The third composition shows a man holding a pair of binoculars, watching the ship as it sails the seas. Could this possibly be the sailor too? If so, who is he watching? Also, is he underwater?

The final composition shows a hand holding a bottle, of which contains the ship sailing the stormy seas. Maybe the ship was actually in the bottle all along and entire scenario (first two compositions) were actually happening inside it? I made it more surrealistic and confusing by adding 2 suns, one in the bottle, and one outside in real life. I played with the concept of a message in the bottle here too. Maybe the ship is actually stuck in that horrifying world (in the bottle) and is in need of some serious help? Perhaps it is trying to SOS to the outside world?

REFLECTIONS

Personal Thoughts

Overall, I really really enjoyed this project as it made me really think out of the box. Keeping it just black and white does have it’s limits too, so I knew that I needed to create interesting compositions to keep the focus on the subjects. This was elaborated using the different styles and textures as mentioned earlier. Though the use of our classmates dingbats makes it hard for us to visualize and work on the exact compositions we want, it actually trains us to “make do with what we have” and surprise ourselves with the unconventional art we can create from it. I’m glad I went through this exercise as it widens my perspectives of visual art.

Tutor’s Thoughts

Joy liked the use of consistent elements (circles, circular shapes, wave “shape”) as it indicates movement. The theme “bizaare” was used intelligently as well. She liked the use of different digital styles and the execution. She also thought that I accentuated the “dream-like” state of surrealism.

Classmates’ Thoughts

OLD DINGBATS + NEW DINGBATS IN SEPARATE POSTS 🙂

2D Project 1 – Lines (Final)

I chose each particular medium based on emotion or aesthetics (whether it looks good/ compliments one another well). For example, I interpreted “fragile” as delicate and gentle. Hence, my medium choice was pigment pen in 0.03mm, the finest point, because it creates the rigidity that I need, at the same time, giving you a gentle effect. As for “exhausted”, I interpreted it as weak and tired. My medium choices were HB and 2B pencils because the softness of this medium can be controlled easily, giving you a variety of tones to portray “weakness”. I also grouped the emotions according to the level of control I had over the mediums chosen. The emotions represented by the pigment pens needed the most amount of control, as I needed to draw more “harsh lines”. For example, “turbulent” was an emotion that required depth and controlled spontaneity, hence, I used pigment pens to show a light to dark gradation.

This project was a rather fun one as I enjoy drawing and painting. Certain emotions were challenging to evoke as they were hard to convey through simply drawing lines. However, what I learnt about this project was that a lot of patience is needed to create good art that speaks to the audience. I also tried my best to put my feelings and emotions into the drawings in the process of experimenting.

2D Assignment 1 – Lines (Research)

Week 1

We were introduced this assignment in the first week and were tasked to express the emotions given through drawing lines, making marks, creating textures etc. My work was very much focused on the process of evoking these emotions. I tried to incorporate my feelings into drawing the lines. I played around with a lot of thick and thin lines, tonal values, contrast in scale of shapes, and intensity of shading according to the “level” of intensity of the particular emotion.

Week 2

At the start of week 2, I researched more into artists whom uses the same technique based approach to create lines. I drew inspiration from some of the artists we’ve researched upon and others such as Neco Delort, an illustrator based in France. His work expresses deep emotions and I felt that it was very inspiring. He focuses a lot on textures and dynamic patterns. I was particularly drawn to harsh, bold and dark lines as they came off as more “confident” and expressive. We also had the chance to experiment with mono-printing in class and I really liked how subtle and sensual the “blurry” prints came out to be. This could portray anxious and “uncertainty” well.

Week 3 & 4

In week 3, I did more in-depth research of artists and their style and techniques. I’ve decided that my concept would be to focus on a medium centric approach which is more process, rather than concept driven. The particular mediums that I focused on are pen, chinese ink, charcoal, graphites and collages. Despite my concept being on exploring mediums and techniques, I also tried to get inspiration from music and book quotes/ references. I feel that music is a good medium of expression and could be key to developing a greater sense of depth in my work.

Nico Delort is one good example of an artist that gets inspired through sentences of books and music. His work “Winterreuse” is nonetheless one of Schubert’s most famous and acclaimed song titles. It features dark and deary, haunting melodies.

Other examples of Nico Delort and his work…

1) A rumour of angels” based on the book by Dale Bailey.

“I sometimes have a hard time describing with words what a story makes me feel —which I guess is why I became an illustrator— so I’m just going to say what really struck me here was the heavy, raw and burnt out atmosphere. Images of harsh light, scorching heat and swirling dust came to me as I was reading it and that’s what I wanted to transcribe in this piece.”

2) The Cave

“Harry could smell salt and hear rushing waves; a light chilly breeze ruffled his hair as he looked out at moonlit sea and star-strewn sky.”

Medium wise, Nico experiments with Faber Castell pigment pens and scratch tools to create defined and intricate marks on his canvas and artwork. I’ve also watched some of his process viedos and I noticed that he etches over black ink and that looked similar to white ink drawn on black. I would like ti experiment on this!

I’ve also found other Charcoal artists such as Judith Ann Braun, Adeline Chong and Wenjing Zhu inspiring. Judith uses 4 basic rules in her work; Symmetry, Abstraction, keeping her work square, and carbon medium. The similarity I found in their work is that they are all process driven. Adeline creates line and form through feeling and reaction from each stroke. Wenjing believes that by reducing details, lines speaks their language and stands out by their own; the minimal attempt enlarges viewers’ imaginary space.

Here are my experimental works… I used tools such as bubble wrap, twigs, plastic bags, toilet scrubs/ sponges etc. and many random things.

Experimenting…

Further brainstorming…