You’re God**** right. —- Walter White, Breaking Bad. (Not a fan yet, just because it kinda fits.)

Project 1, TYPOGRAPHIC Portrait Problem has finally ended, and there goes my first presentation of the semester.

So, to make up the whole progress, I’m gonna start from where I stopped.

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I’m not a big nerd on architecture, so I decided to stay as an interested audience of the art of buildings and cut off the composition from my set to fit the 4-frame-project. Moreover, filling up the building’s shape did not work as strong as my other compositions in terms of subtleties, and fine tip pens are not challenging enough either. Cutting away the pedestrian paths and underground tunnels are due to the potentially overcrowded components. Since its idea was started from the escalator itself, so I just simplified it as the medium is a tough tool to control as well.

TYPOGRAPHIC PORTRAIT PROBLEM

My Name is

20160218_182525and I’m a logical person.

During my city exploration, I was unable to use internet data or GPS due to my financial restrictions. Thus, all I can rely on from getting lost are the locality maps from the MRT stations, and the STREET SIGNS on my way. This method of navigating shows my logical attributes when finding my way in the city.

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Once I am familiarized with addressing format of a town, I won’t worry about not finding the certain locations as these street signs aided me big time. Also, I think I got my directional sense from my dad, so retracing my route was never a problem either. (Unless the scale and complexity of the city was too overwhelming.) I’ve paired the idea with collage making, the medium used by DADA when they first establish. Therefore, I considered it as a form of real life photoshopping as it requires certain amount of logic to piece every component together. The street signs are chosen based on all the streets I’ve been during my stay in Singapore. Some were photographed on the spot, some were screen-shot from the blessed Google Street, therefore resulted the major difference in their brightness. To find my name, just simply spell out the missing letters that were replaced by the white boxes, and you’ll be logically reading my name, just as the piece intended to be.

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However, it certainly has flaws. From the feedback of my fellow classmates, they were distracted by the sign posts thinking that my name hide between the negative spaces. After my clarification, they liked the idea of hiding what I wanted to show in this typographic portrait.

My Name is

20160218_182512and I’m not afraid to be weird in front of the citizens.

Why the caption? This is because I often (not always) ask stupid questions when I’m exploring around the city. I am thankful to every pedestrians who’ve helped me when I was confused or oblivious about the directions. (Yes, despite how confident I sounded just now, that do happens.)

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There are different faces in every trip, and I definitely can’t remember how they all look like, that’s why I chose to design them in monochromatic black-clothed figures, which symbolized how rare we meet each other again. I wanted to present many identities, therefore I scratched through all my memories on the streets, in the train, or in certain locations. The figures are designed with identifiable common gestures. There are arranged in a way that you are able to see my surname LOO for a certain distance, which achieved how unrecognizable I was in a big city. The medium I used for this piece is water color. Mistakes made by water color can be easily covered or blended out, thus suiting my piece of not afraid to ask the wrong questions. (Mainly also because I am less likely to see these individual again.)

How my classmates mistaken it as a printed work was a compliment to me, even though some have commented that this was a little out of place among my whole project. Moreover, not everyone are able to see the hidden surname in it. Perhaps a better design need to be implement for a better effect next time.

My Name is

20160218_182423and I’m a confident person.

That’s some big words to say. I believe my confidence are shown clearly in my previous piece, but the confidence is difficult to build. It requires many assuring factors and abilities to form my confidence, just like how the Singapore MRT connects the cities. (This is not an advertisement.)

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Testing for the right hue

I resembles confidence with MRT not only due to they’re confident that no station was wasted in terms of utilization, but also due to how confident they are with their arrival time estimation. Back in Malaysia, it was until the 2010s that our public transport placed the arrival time in their clocks as they are constantly late and delayed in the previous decades. Singapore MRT did not disappoint me with its estimated arrival time almost every time. (Yes, almost, because there was some breakdowns.) I picked the piece to represent my middle name JUN as this attribute only can be seen by people who began to know me.

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The piece was drawn by Sharpie and Faber Castell’s markers. Their ink penetrates the paper easily therefore it needs to be used lightly. Using it tested my limits in controlling their color tone, perfecting the circles, (I’m still a human after all.)and maintaining the straight lines without any ruler. (Many illustrator are able to do this, so I considered an challenge from my idols.)

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The feedback for this are mostly positive, so I was relieved the whole composition worked out. The bigger challenge is to make it recognizable to the viewers but avoid making it too complicated.

My Name is

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and I’m a curious person.

An escalator form a bird eyes’ view is how I express my curiosity. During my exploration, most of the MRT are either in the elevated or placed underground. Thus much of my exploration time was spent on this particular transportation. It is the fundamental portal I must go through to see a new street, a new surrounding, and a new city. Within half a minute taking the escalator, my curiosity towards the scenery I’m gonna witness elevated as well for the next 30 seconds. For this new found attribute that’s been hidden a long time, I paired it with my YUAN as it probably can be seen by people who knew me well or solely myself.

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To suit such special attribute I found in the escalator and myself, I’ve chose the method of print-making. I’ve cut a template out of a slightly heavier paper and cover a piece of an alphabet shaped paper with the template. I believe my curiosity is not as black as the machine’s original color, so I chose my acrylics as the coloring medium. Acrylics are way thicker that water colors but their saturation resulted a ideal tone for this piece. The thicker they are, the easier it became a disaster. I had to redo a couple of times before I am happy with the end results, and the disaster happened during a desperate times. (the night before submission, my friends.)

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Some of my classmates are intrigued by the idea of taking a new perspective for the neglected machine. The overall project was appreciated and I am happy for what I’m able to do with my new limitations. (not doing the film things.) Ms.Joy has commented that the work accomplished its purpose for leading the viewers to a new perspective of my hobby, and it can be further enhanced by placing the piece in different spots.

The work was a success for me despite the aesthetic aspect of my classmate works are better. However,  I could learn more in contextualized my future work from the beautiful works of my classmates, through this project. (Perhaps a better time management would be good as well.) As always, I am looking forward to everyone’s next project.

Thanks for reading!

Finally after a week of considerations, my nursery rhyme was set to be ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE. I don’t need to explain that this IS a rhyme since almost everyone who was born before the millennium knows it. A progress is a progress, so I shall place the full rhyme below.

One, two, three, four, five,
Once I caught a fish alive,
Six, seven, eight, nine, ten,
Then I let it go again.
Why did you let it go?
Because it bit my finger so.
Which finger did it bite?
This little finger on the right.

I felt nostalgic when I saw this rhyme during my research as it was one of the English nursery rhymes I first encountered in the language. So I figured, it has a perfect flow of story and able to be visualized with real objects, suitable for my choice of nursery rhyme.

The first challenge I faced was the concept. Then I remembered that DADA artists uses things we can immediately recognize to convey their intentions in a unconventional way. In other words, try to be indirect with iconic symbols, in this case, dingbats. So my orientation will describe the words indirectly even for “one”. Thus the following visual journal sketches were created.

20151012_223013 20151012_223018 20151012_223024 20151012_223032The arrangements were made by copying the selected dingbats on my computer screen. I figured this way of planning can shorten my processing time. Also, I always have a clearer mind with it comes to hand-drawn sketches. After a few modifications, I am happy with my sketches and thus moved on to the software.

 

 

 

 

 

One of the main character of the rhyme is the fish. It got caught and bit its catcher for its own escape. I can’t just find a fish dingbat to fill this badass place. To be honest, I just can’t find any fishes in the dingbats collection considering it is a basic creature. Thus I thought of being ‘resourceful’ in my own way and built a fish from the remaining dingbats. As you can see, this fish was made out of a bee, a pair of woman lips, leaves, flower petals, SBS double decked bus, and an umbrella.

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I had fun composing the fish. Suddenly, I thought, why not substitute it with the luxurious items I found among the dingbats? The fish in the rhyme can be interpreted as the material needs that we occasionally obtain. Sometimes these needs cost a certain price, therefore “bit” us in the finger. We can’t keep what wasn’t ours.

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Therefore, a fish composed from a bracelet, an unknown branded handbag, a sport car, a high heels, a Mac, an ancient coin, and another set of lips just to make it lifelike.

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A bear holding up a high five. Four well dressed lads. Three Trees. A balance scale which require two sides like the justice it represents. The one ring to rule them all.

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Ten fingers. A howling caNINE. Eight spiders. Seven saxophones (Saxophone is the closest thing I can get to shape like the number). 3 Satans’ mask, for the sake of satan’s phone number.

Why Hitler? Hitler was one of the victim of the needs — power. Also, his gesture looked like he was releasing a fish.

wdylig bibmfs wfdib - Copy

“Why did you let it go?” Captain Picard says to the strutting Leo as the questioned tweedle dum/dee looks at him. Leo might think he’s an angel in heart for releasing the fish who secretly celebrates its victory. But Leo reveals the truth with diamonds.

Diamonds may not shape like fish teeth, but they certainly have the shape to form a vicious set.

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The little finger on my right, represented with a can of pills, signifies it’s the one in pain at the time.

Thanks for reading my whole process. I really had great fun doing the pictures. It’d be a good experience if it wasn’t constantly interrupted by my laptop’s faulty back-light. Hope you find my exploration interesting. See you soon in my next project!

Comparing to my fellow classmates, I might be slow in terms of conceptualizing. The sudden change of the final rhyme had me undone the thinking process I’ve gotten so far. Frankly I kind of lost in concept too.

I haven’t decide on the final nursery rhyme I am going to use yet, possibly due to my fading memory of the rhymes I grew up with. None of the nursery rhymes was ever been my favorite because every time I looked into any books of nursery rhymes, I was immediately attracted by the illustrations beside them. True story.

Most of the dingbats I created were based on the key words on each paragraph of “The road not taken”, and followed by an intense (not really) image searching in Google. Several internet memes came across my head and my screen which I found a bit of humor in them. Even some of them are the symbolic icons we all know like the David statue and the evolution of human graph. As I mentioned in the last post, what I comprehended about the referenced artist is that they used things that familiar to us to create something that are meaningful to them. So, why not try some of these icon to create the dingbats? We knew what they so we won’t be worrying about how we’re going to use them.

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I will never run out of materials thanks to the wide range of dingbats’ variety provided by my fellow classmates. Seriously, can you imagine how much space it would take up if I need to download them all?

Thanks to Mr. Lawrence’s crash course on Photoshop, I managed to create a picture by playing around my dingbats. But it will take me a longer time to adapt the style of modern abstraction like dadaism by walking out of the familiar picture compositing. Also, I need to be able to express my rhymes as well.

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My attempt based on the elements appeared in “The road not taken”. Yet the dingbats lack interactions between one and other.

However, the concept and style of my project will be clarified within this recess (clear throat) week and eventually be able to represent the nursery rhymes the dingbats will soon be depicting.

blue masksI have a habit of saving 9gag (and other interesting site’s) quotes on my phone so I can scroll the favourite part of my favourite site offline in hopes of using them the future. It’s a wonderful news that this project enables me to use my saves since it doesn’t specified the types of poems and rhymes. That means I can use modern poems which seems to be more relevant to our lives today.

 

I like the three poems on the sides as they are interesting enough to stand out equally with the modern song which are rhymes that is widely appreciated nowadays. Among all the choices, I’ll be using The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost. It’s beautiful and inspiring, but long enough for me to have the other two as just-in-case.

the road not taken<Click picture for full size.>The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost, illustrated by ZEN PENCILS.

 

Opinions aside, back to the topic– my searching on the reference artists and styles recommended by the notes given. The first impression I got from the styles I searched — Surrealism and Dadaism is visually impact and attract. In my opinion, The two styles sort of work in similar ways. They capture your curiosity with the images, collages, dingbats, forms, and photos we can resemble to, then the art hold them all together regardless of their habitat (where they supposed to belong.) forming something that what we (in the absence of knowledge of art) called abstraction. Similar to how impressionism is to renaissance art, surrealism and dadaism stood out of the crowd of expressive art.(Non-depicting and recording art.) To me, surrealism is more in the expressive side, but dadaism is more in a form of mockery. (what the artists said.)

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I don’t think Salvador Dalí wanted to mock Johannes Vermeer but probably to express his admiration to the artist in The Ghost of Vermeer of Delft Which Can Be Used As a Table.

Surrealism usually was explained as expressing the artists’ dream or non-reality on the canvas or just to express a purpose in an unconventional but still showing their skills in making art. (Modern art probably ditched the latter.)

Hannah Höch. German, 1889-1978 Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany (Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands). 1919-1920 Photomontage and collage with watercolor, 44 7/8 x 35 7/16” (114 x 90 cm) Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie © 2006 Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin, © 2006 Hannah Höch / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, photo: Jörg P. Anders, Berlin

Hannah Höch. German, 1889-1978
Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany (Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands). 1919-1920
Photomontage and collage with watercolor, 44 7/8 x 35 7/16” (114 x 90 cm)
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie
© 2006 Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin,
© 2006 Hannah Höch / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, photo: Jörg P. Anders, Berlin

Hannah Hoch, on the other hand, created her art with collage of images from paper publications. Seemingly this style of art appears to be closer to what we’re going to do in this project. Her art, instead of being symbolic in the components, portraits her ideas and criticize in the whole picture, like Cut with a Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany (1919). (A really long name though.)

This artwork is said to be referring to the decadence of pre-war German culture, metaphorically criticizing humankind’s lack of humanity. (theartstory.org) The mockery component of dadaism and Hannah Hoch can be seen by reproducing art with produced images.

russian constructismLater came Russian Constructivism. Which style was depicted by the google image results above.

First word popped into my head, communism. The soviet union used this style for so long that people from other parts of the world used as a style of art/ poster. Russian Constructivism attracts my eyes with sharp colors and lines, simple figures and dingbats, as well as the standardized font. The attraction is a success and can be continued with presenting their message. (Whether indirect or not.) Probably it is what sparks the idea of this poster.the-interview-movie-poster

In conclusion, what the reference artist helped in my creation:

  1. The images I construct don’t have to be direct or literal. The presentation in the structure don’t have to be conventional. (As shown in the student’s work.) It doesn’t  have to be like Dr. Seuss illustrations. My orientation is yet to be decided and attempted.
  2. Any dingbats from anyone can be used as long as it’s coherent to what I need to express the lines of my poem.
  3. Since it’s in black and white, so color of Constructivism can’t be imitated. However, its striking image structure is impressive.