You’ve saw the title. Project 2 ended as everyone planned and my classmates never cease to surprise me with their wonderful job. Everyone has been using the same supplies of Dingbats but the results are unique, thought-out, and mind blowing. They saw their own shortcoming in the process and resolved the problems by creating more astonishing dingbats. With new dingbats, their new product covered their themes perfectly. It’s always fun and inspiring to see how my classmates think of their final product as you can literally see their thinking process in their works.

I’d say our presentations were a success as every of them was clarifying and intriguing to us. The amount of post-it notes pasted during the session proved everyone’s concentration and cooperation as listeners. I finished the challenge I gave myself before the session as well, which was comment on everyone’s work, whether compliments or suggestions. Although they’re not well written, yet that was the longest attention span I ever had within the decade.

20151015_182500

I’m actually quite satisfied with my work too. Comparing to my last project, I put more thoughts and did some unconventional attempts in my work. These are the action that considered rare in my past products. The printing did a great justice to my work, and so are the others’. They all looked better than on screen in my opinion.

20151025_211421Fortunately, Ms. Joy and my classmates liked the ways I introduced my concept and at least understood every part of my work. (Which is honestly a relief.) In fact, they offered some great suggestions in their comments, which formed another challenge for my next project.

I’m glad I paid efforts in the project as the satisfaction is a big deal for  me. Although there are still A LOT OF space of improvement in the project, I felt willing to take my next project in a more serious manner, push it to the next level.

 

20151025_211452

Every comment is so damn encouraging. Not only in mine, but others as well. I wish this wonderful spirit of G1 will forever live on.

 

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.

20151012_223047

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.

20151012_223040
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.

12345 once i caught a fish alive - Copy

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.

678910 then i let it go again2 - Copy

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.

delittlefingeronmyright - Copy

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.

google doc

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.

first attempt2

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.