Louisa Lek – Page 10 – lou's journal

2D Assignment 1: My Line is Emo

YAY WE’VE MADE IT TO THE END OF ASSIGNMENT 1!

Here is the final list of emotions I chose to do:

Adoration

It was really hard for me to figure out how to present adoration as a visual. I still kept associating adoration with the whole idea of puppy love and all its related imagery. This is why in the end I decided to go with using cotton wool to create this piece. More specifically, the piece is made using a combination of cotton wool and pillow stuffing (No pillows were harmed in the making of this piece. I used some that I bought a while back from Daiso).Adoration, to me, was a very light emotion. It did not feel “heavy” like passion or lust. When I hear the word ‘adore’, I associate it with words like ‘gentle’, ‘soft’ and ‘tender’. This is why I decided to go ahead and use these materials to represent the emotion. As with every emotion, they ebb and flow. The change in the width represent this constant change.

Surprise

I knew I wanted to use balloons somehow in this piece but I was not exactly sure how. One of the things that I thought of initially was to attach balloons onto the strip of paper and then burst them in class, literally giving people a surprise, but I don’t think my classmates nor the lecturer would appreciate that. In the end, I decided to fill a couple of balloons with a small amount of ink and burst them over the strip of paper. As I knew this was going to be messy, I had this crazy idea to do it in one of the shower stalls so that I am able to easily wash out the ink splatters afterwards. And that is what I did. (At this point in time, I feel that I should give a quick shoutout to my roommate because credit should be given when credits are due. To my roomie, thank you for helping me knot the ends of the balloons, for coming into the toilet with me at 2 in the morning to create this piece as well as for helping me clean up the shower stall afterwards. YOU DA BEST!!!!!) The strip of paper was placed on the floor and balloons were arranged randomly over it. I then proceed to close my eyes and pop the balloons at random, doing so until I was happy with the results.

Sentimentality

Originally, the emotion that I wanted to work on was Contentment (kindly please read my post on my process for Assignment 1 to know more about my plans for that). However, it kind of did not work out. While staring at the different strings and materials strewed across my table, this concept kind of came to mind.According to Google, sentimentality is “the quality or state of being marked or governed by feeling, sensibility or emotional idealism.”. To me, sentimentality is letting your current emotions cloud your memories. When we think back about what happened in the past, we don’t view it with the same pair of eyes or mindset that we had when we first experienced what had happened in the memory. Instead, we judge it based on our current state of mind. With that, it changes the way we feel when we look back upon that memory and might even let our current emotional state change the memory. And that is what I wanted to express in this piece.The piece is made up of tissue paper at the bottom to round out the general shape, several pieces of white yarn woven together to form a thicker rope which is then braided with strips of linen fabric and wrapped with nylon fishing line. To me, the memory is represented by the rope in the middle while the current emotions are being represented using the other materials. In the beginning, the other materials are just loosely braided around the rope and bit of the rope can still be seen, symbolising people reminiscing about the past. As we move along the strip, from left to right, the rope starts to get more and more covered up and finally when you reach the last part of the strip, the rope can no longer be seen. This symbolises how towards the end, our current emotions have already clouded that particular memory and that it is no longer the same anymore.

Anxiety

I went ahead with my plan, as detailed in my post on the mark-making process. I was actually quite satisfied with how it turned out although I did end up redoing it again because I was not exactly satisfied with the composition after staring at it for a while. Personally, it does make me feel a little unsettled. But then again, this is because I made the piece and thus the piece will always carry my significance and interpretation of it. The piece was made using Chinese ink on paper. I used a dry medium sized flat brush to make the faint spirals in the background first before using a small detail brush and flat brush to continue making spirals of different weight and thickness across the strip of paper.To me, the light spirals in the background symbolises the times when I am able to get my anxiousness in check and not have it spiral out of control, which is why the lines are faint and the spirals are slightly cropped. The darker spirals then present the times when maybe I am under a lot more pressure and the feelings of anxiousness is a lot more intense. The size of the spiral represents my perceived lack of control. The larger it is, the more helpless and out of control I felt.

Grumpiness

To me, grumpiness is relatively mild as compared to other emotions such as rage, fury, wrath or spite. Personally, even when I am feeling grumpy, I try as much as I can to not show it outwardly. As such, when thinking about what can possibly represent grumpiness, I thought of simmering water. If we were to take boiling water as anger, simmering water would be perfect to represent grumpiness. If you were to agitate a grumpy person, grumpiness would give way to anger, fury or even rage. Just as if you continue to boil simmering water, it would soon become a rolling boil. And that is the idea that I wanted to express in the piece.This piece was made using toothpaste mixed with black gouache. I smear the mixture onto the strip of paper with a brush first, in the rough shape that I want the piece to be in, before leaving it to dry up slightly. Once it has firmed up slightly, I used my fingers to create swirls, peaks and indentations to create the effect of simmering water. Initially, I was going to use black acrylic paint together with toothpaste or even black paint mixed together with craft glue. However, after experimenting with the different mixtures, the one that gave the effect closest to what I wanted was black gouache mixed together with toothpaste. It took quite a long while to dry but at least it made everything smell minty fresh 🙂

GUILT

I went ahead with the plan I had as mentioned in my process post though things did not quite go according to plan. On hindsight, I should not have used a heavier piece of paper to do the final version. The cigarette took quite a while to create the burn marks, making this piece one of the more time consuming ones to make. Also, it was a terrible idea to scan the piece into the computer and render it black and white before printing it out and mounting it on a black mounting board. The actual holes in the piece blended in with the now-black burn marks and it just made the whole piece look underwhelming, unimpressive and just crappy in general. However, it was all that I have and I did not have time (nor the resources to get more cigarettes) to redo the piece. Note to self, for future projects, PLEASE HAVE BETTER TIME MANAGEMENT!
The piece started out with me using a lit cigarette to create burn marks or even holes in the paper. The longer I held it, the bigger the mark was or eventually, it becomes a hole. To create a bigger hole, I just had to gently blow at the ambers to allow it to continue burning away at the paper before blowing at it a little harder for the ambers to burn out. Once the whole paper was filled up, I scanned the whole thing into the computer, rendered it in grayscale (another mistake, should have made it fully black and white) before printing it out. I then went back in with an incense cone to re-create the holes and went back in with a brush pen to darken the burn marks.The symbolism behind the different sized burn marks and holes is that each of these represent how much “self-harm” we inflict upon ourselves when we feel guilty. The more you let the guilt eat away at you (represented by how long I held the cigarette to the paper), the larger the burn mark, till finally the cigarette burns through and it leaves a permanent hole there. To me, it is a reminder to myself that one must come to terms with their own past. I have done a lot of things that I regret but there is no point in beating myself up each time I think about those things and let them prevent me from trying my best to live in the present.

General Reflection:
I think this project has been a really interesting one and I really did enjoyed the whole process of completing it. I love experimenting with different kinds of materials and textures and it was fun trying to use all kinds of materials lying around, to try to make a mark. If there is one thing that I have learnt, it is that I still have a long way to go in terms of learning how to better express my ideas, be it verbally or through visuals, as required by this assignment. And I really do agree with what Athirah said in class yesterday about how this project forces us to come to terms with ourselves. I think through the project, it reveals our thoughts, feelings and how we process the world. Each piece carries our opinions and feelings, translated into visual form, and now shown to the world (or at least, just to the class). As I sit here writing out this (really long) post, I feel almost vulnerable, revealing so much of my thought process onto the internet. All in all, it has been an interesting first assignment and I look forward to the other assignments coming my way.

Research on Mark-making

Time to share what I have learnt so far about mark-making. Let’s start with defining what is mark-making! According to Mick Maslen and Jack Southern in their book, The Drawing Projects: An Exploration of The Language of Drawing, marks are defined as “the alphabet that forms the words that make the prose, and are the elements with which the drawing is made” while mark-making as “the broad term used to include all marks that are made visible a a manifestation of applied or gestural energy”. Simply put, mark-making describes the dots, lines, patterns and textures created in an artwork, regardless of the material used to create the mark or the canvas on which the marks are made.

Different marks have different meaning and usages. According to VanseoDesign.com, different lines have different meanings. Below is a quick summary of what is written in their article, “The Meaning of Lines: Developing A Visual Grammar”.

Thin Lines – “suggest frailty and convey an elegant quality”
Thin Lines – “suggest strength” and “make a statement”
Horizontal Lines – “suggest calm and quiet” and “a restful peace”
Vertical Lines – “suggest stability, especially when thicker” and “may give the impression of dignity”.
Diagonal Lines – Describe as unbalanced and could “convey action and motion” therefore “create tension and excitement”
Curved Lines – “express fluid movement” and “can be calm or dynamic depending on how much they curve”
Zigzag Lines – “create excitement and intense movement” as well as “convey confusion and nervousness”

The article also touches on how lines can feel natural or artificial depending on the texture of the line. A straight and perfectly even line feels artificial while a line with slight variations in its thickness feels more natural.

While doing this research, I came across this artwork by a British artist called Bernard Cohen, titled In That Moment.

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/images/work/T/T00/T00800_10.jpg Bernard Cohen In That Moment

His usage of curving lines and bright colours caught my eye and the way that the lines seem to have two tones to it, reminds me of neon lights. According to the Tate.org.uk, this artwork is “a single line which Cohen continued till the whole surface was covered. Changing the colours a random intervals, he painted it one stretch at a time, first by brush, in oil paint, and then by overspraying with an emulsion of oil and egg. This yielded a line with two distinct textures, each immaculate.”. I thought the method that he used to create this artwork is quite interesting. I mean, who would have thought to spray a mixture of oil and egg over oil paint? Or maybe I am just not that familiar with painting techniques hahaha.

This concludes my research on this topic. Off to the next step of self-exploration!

Sources:

Title image is taken from http://alwaysarty.blogspot.sg/2014/03/mark-making.html

Life’s gude

In-class assignment whoop 🙂

Mark-making Process

update (5 sep):

Here are some photos from the process of producing the final marks for submission:

Update (29 aug):

Finally got around to picking out the 6 emotions that we were supposed to work on. Here are the emotions, their dictionary meaning (taken from Merriam Webster) as well as my own interpretation of it:

Grumpiness: the state of being moodily cross
In my head, I see grumpiness as this black viscous liquid, matt black and sticky. How I would see it being represented in marks would be to have like a kind of viscous liquid being dripped onto the piece of paper. As the drips move towards the center, the drips will either get bigger or much closer, representing the growing discontentment. Then, as we move towards the end of the strip, the drips will slowly be placed further apart, representing the change in the person’s level of grumpiness. I thought of using candle wax initially but did not know where I could find black candles being sold. After the having the consultation with Shirley, together with Alena and Yu Ruo, I was given the suggestion of using toothpaste and black paint. I thought that was pretty interesting and might try it out during the weekend.

Guilt: the feeling of deserving blame for offences
For guilt, I kind of already had this idea in mind when we were first given this project brief. I wanted to use cigarettes to leave behind burn marks on the paper. Personally, when I feel guilty, I will constantly think about what went wrong and what I could have done different that could potentially have changed the situation. This behaviour just serves to make me feel even worse about the whole situation and in a sense, is like inflicting harm on myself. This, to me, is similar to smoking. My final year project at Ngee Ann Polytechnic was to come up with an anti-smoking campaign for the Singapore Cancer Society. Through the project, one of the things I learnt is a lot of smokers actually feel guilty about smoking. They know about the negative impact that smoking brings about to their health but still continue to do so while feeling guilty about being unable to stop. Through these, I thought that it would be appropriate to use cigarettes to create the marks for guilt.

Anxiety: Apprehensive uneasiness or nervousness usually over an impending or anticipated ill
I associate anxiety with spirals partially because of the phrase ‘spiralling out of control’ and also because I really do feel that way. Whenever I feel anxious and am unable to get a grip on my emotions, it really does feel like the problem is multiplying, that they are growing and that I am losing whatever control there is over the situation. As such, for this emotion, I wanted to just create layers of spirals and playing around with the size, texture and opacity of each spiral.

Adoration: The act or state of feeling or showing great affection and devotion
I find it quite hard to find a visual representation of positive emotions. While it is true that usually circular patterns represent positive emotions, I did not want to go down that route and wanted to find an alternative. When I think of adoration, I think of puppy love and from there I think of paper hearts, fluffy things like stuff toys or cotton candy or clouds.

Contentment: The quality or state of showing satisfaction
Positive emotions are going to be the death of me. As mentioned earlier, I am not sure how to present positive emotions as visuals and have to think about it through (weird) associations. In my head, I see contentment as this long fluid line that goes across the strip of paper. As just simply drawing a long wavy line across the paper seems too simple and because I like textures, I thought I could create a line, using strings of different thickness and material woven together, representing the different things that make me feel content, to symbolise contentment.

Surprise: The feeling caused by something unexpected or unusual
Somehow I associate surprise with balloons so I am thinking about doing something with balloons.

[Note to reader: The formatting for the paragraphs is, as a friend would put it, no go man. I am sorry that the gap is so ridiculously huge but I don’t know how to format it proper 🙁 ]

UPDATE (22 AUG):

Experimentation was really fun but at the same time, I felt like I had no purpose in mind. Initially I was going to decide on the emotions first before starting to think about the marks that I wanted to create but a friend pointed out to me that by doing so, I would just be limiting myself. And I do see his point. If I did not experiment, I would not be able to discover for myself the different ways I can use different objects to make different kinds of marks (I used the word different thrice or maybe four times in a row now woohoo). We will see how it goes.

update (21 Aug):

I thought of a whole bunch of objects that I would want to play with for this mark-making tool project but I totally forgot to bring them with me when I came back to hall on Sunday evening *facepalm* Guess I have to run out of campus to pick up some supplies this evening.

Initially I wanted to use cigarette butts as a mark-making tool. Like literally light the cigarette up and press it onto the paper. Or take used cigarette butts, apply some ink and smear the whole thing onto paper. I kind of still want to try out this idea but maybe not in class because my classmates just pointed out to me that used cigarette stink and that the classroom, my bag and whatever else the used cigarette touches is going to smell like that as well. Yikes. An alternative would be joss sticks or incense sticks but we will see how it goes and whether I can actually procure these items before class tomorrow.

Another object that I wanted to use as a mark-making tool is charcoal pills. Or just pills in general. I thought it would be interesting to apply ink on 1 side, place it on a piece of paper and run it through a press just to see what kind of effect it would have. For all I know, it might just leave a blobby mess but I guess it is worth a shot and besides, this is a time for us to explore so I am going to explore to my heart’s content.

Other objects that I plan on trying includes cling wrap (I have some that I used to wrap up my clay models for transporting from my house to school. Not sure if the dust on the surface would affect the print it will produce but again, it might produce some interesting results so why not), scrunched up scotch tape, scrunched up oil blotting sheets, straws, stuffing or loose cotton wool, various plastic cutlery and maybe a random piece of harden clay. Or maybe even soft clay. Because I have quite a bit left over from my Foundation 3D class. Let’s hope I am able to get the objects I need before class tomorrow.

FIRST FOUNDATION 2D CLASS

I got lost trying to find my way to class today BUT I STILL MADE IT SO YAY

Was thinking of using leaves as my mark-making tool but I should probably decide on the emotions that I want to work on first before actually deciding on the objects.