I designed the posters and leaflets to advertise and promote the concert. The photographs were taken by another photographer (except 1). I edited the pictures and then added the text information.
These posters were placed around Nanyang Technological University while the leaflets were slot into door name card holders of every student and staff residential hall unit.
This is the photograph that I took . I had to organise the dancers into this standing layout and direct them on how to pose.
The following are my final outcomes and explanations:
Affection
I feel that affection is like a mist that’s all around us all the time, we are being loved by people. It may not always be obvious but subconsciously we know they are there always looking out for us etc. Sometimes more than others we feel the presence of love and affection hence certain areas are darker.
Lust
To me, lust is made up of two halves: the conscious desire for something, as well as the subconscious urge to fulfil that desire. In the composition, the lower portion represents an all-consuming desire, shown by strong, bold brushstrokes of dark paint. The upper portion is made up of minuscule pieces, giving rise to a sense of discomfort as the irregularity causes your skin to crawl. Although the two halves are different, they are both overwhelming in their own ways. The diagonal portrayal is not only aesthetically pleasing, but suggests at the inverse relationship of these two concepts. As one increases, the other decreases, and vice versa.
Longing
Inspired by Hannah Quinlivan
The lines are irregular, move in every direction and bend at improper angles, symbolizing a longing or need for something. The lines trail off to the edge of the paper, never finding an ending, conclusion or any form of closure. Also, I tried to illustrate longing by simplifying the the action of want (pulling, grappling for it) by making blocky trapezium shapes as fingers. I tried to create depth like how she did but instead by using different pen tip thickness(0.1 and 0.5). However, I feel that the depth element in my piece is not obvious.
Cheerfulness
This was a more of a experimental piece. When I think of cheerfulness, I associate it as being bubbly. I associate bubbles and round figures with the word bubbly. Hence in this piece I did swirls. Furthermore, I added netting with circular holes and placed them around the ink bubbles, encircling them or even rolling up the netting into a slight conical shape.
Pride
I feel that pride is a very internal feeling of happiness due to your achievements or meeting/surpassing one’s expectations. In this way, I tried to portray it in a very circular motion, as if there’s this physical manifestation rolling inside of us and emitting satisfaction and happiness.
Optimism
A tiny glimmer in the midst of darkness: that’s what optimism is to me. When all seems lost and you’re just holding onto the hope and belief that things are going to change for the better. The white lines seem to spring forth from a single point in the darkness, showing that optimism can radiate outwards and influence others around us.
Relief
To me, relief is an incredibly light feeling. The sensation that a burden has been lifted, or that a tension has been relieved. I tried to recreate this with the light, airy, brushstrokes, coupled with the light shade of the ink.
Surprise
A sudden or unexpected turn of events evokes surprise. To me, surprise is more often a positive thing, although it can be negative as well. I chose to use white pen on black paper to portray this. The short straight lines that radiate outwards in the dark are reminiscent of fireworks, which I feel are a good representation of surprise: a sudden outburst of bright colour/activity where there was nothing before.
Irritation
The vertical, irregular lines serve to create a sense of uneasiness and tension. There is also a tension in the struggle between the white and black areas of the composition. I imagine the black lines as irritation, and the white area as clarity, hence the black lines are slowly encroaching into the centre, obscuring clarity and clear-headedness.
Rage
Inspired by Mark Tobey
To me, rage is a build-up process – the level of intensity increase into finally a rage that is an uncontrollable anger that cannot be contained. It is a destructive force. There is a gradation in how solid and “filled-in” the calligraphic lines are. The strong, thick and dark lines contributes to this feeling of overly intense emotion. The curves of the lines are evocative of grass in the field bent over by the strong winds of hurricane of rage.
Disgust
When I feel queasy, I feel as if the insides of me are mushing together and churning. Instances of extreme disgust result in nausea, and extreme nausea results in vomit. The biomorphic shapes are reminiscent of bacteria, or stomach lining, both things that are associated with vomit.
Envy
Envy is when you are jealous of other people or things, and you hope for such things for yourself – partly because you’re probably not as good. These represent the steps you have to take to become the person you envy. The pencil markings symbolize the steps that you have yet to take.
Torment
To me, torment is something quite internal. I don’t like to show it outwardly, hence I used a white pen on white paper to portray the sense that it’s being hidden in plain sight. It’s full of turmoil and angst, hence the multiple jagged lines. I added a layer of white glue over to mask further the inner conflicts. This makes the white lines even harder to see.
Suffering
The blots of ink that seem to slowly bleed outwards are reminiscent of dried teardrops on a surface. Suffering causes us to feel trapped, and sometimes we feel powerless and unable to do anything except weep. The use of human hair also suggests that suffering causes our hair to drop off, or make us pull out or own hair.
Shame
To me, shame is synonymous with embarrassment. When we are embarrassed, we try to save ourselves by fleeing or by covering up. We try to protect ourselves from mockery? I depicted something like a shield that we would try to protect ourselves with. However, this “shield” will likely not be foolproof, so I depicted some gaps along the “shield”.
Neglect
Neglect has the encapsulates the idea of isolation for me. There are many kinds of neglect, neglect of one when you pay attention to everything else or neglect and the feeling of emptiness and lack of sense of belonging, of which the latter is what I’m trying to portray. It is as if everything is the same, white-washed, and you’re the ugly mark that no one likes and disapproves of and is left behind.
Sympathy
I feel that sympathy is something we don’t explicitly mention most of the time. Hence, I used white pen on white paper, to evoke that aspect. I feel that sympathy also has quite a gentle, embracing, quality which I tried to bring out with the flowing lines. Some of the lines crisscross and intersect as I feel that it’s sympathy, not empathy, hence we do not fully understand and feel what the other person is going through.
Nervousness
Taking memories of myself being nervous, for example ordering a subway, I tried to represent how I feel. It feels like a stammer-y mess. You know exactly what you want to order yet something stresses you. I tried showing some relatively static movement as if to mimic the myself playing and fiddling around with my hands to ease the little internal vibrations and conflicts.
For lesson, we were told to close our eyes and think of a memory related to the emotion words. With this in mind, we were then to use our non-master hand to draw/doodle with our pencil how that memory makes us feel. I used a 6B pencil throughout.
HAPPY:
I did this 3 times. I can’t remember what memories I did for every thought, I just remembered that the last memory I based on was with regards to my first time interacting with dolphins. But I realized that it was very hard for me to pinpoint a happy memory when everything I thought of had very sad or angry emotion attached to it too.
What else I can see in the lines:
Whale
Happy face
Dancing person
Clouds
Peas in a pod
Shoes
Character of lines:
Wiry
Mangled
Circular, curved
Interlocking
Fast slow fast slow strokes on paper
ANGRY:
Anger at my JC art mentor
What else I can see in the lines:
A person running (I tend to walk very fast if I’m alone)
Some resemblance to Arabic calligraphy (it looks quite therapeutic despite being contrary to how I felt)
Tadpoles
Character of lines:
Organic
Pressed very hard
Short bursts of anger
Thicker lines
SADNESS:
Sad that the people who I trusted and thought believed in me didn’t stand up for me.
There is a very big contrast in the lines when I think of the same memory at different times. I feel that the first one shows sadness with hints of anger, and that it’s a very loud sobbing kind of cries. Whereas the second one is more of a sniffing cry, a I’m-trying-to-accept-it-and-I’m-still-sad.
What else I can see in the lines:
Hummingbird’s head
Character of lines:
Side of the pencil – grainer, thicker lines
Tip of the pencil – thin lines
Very close together – huddled, barely stops
NERVOUS:
Riding on an electric bicycle for the first time
Ordering at subway
What else I can see in the lines:
Grass patch
Man/monkey running away
Character of lines:
Much shorter length of strokes
Very stammer-y like
Reflections:
I feel many of these things(matching scribbly lines to shapes and objects) are pure coincidence(?). And if the lines seem to show a subject matter, they mostly don’t relate to the feeling at all – for instance the whale in happiness.
I felt that my feelings are quite hard to emote through lines – maybe it’s a sign I’m not cut out to be an abstract artist. Overall, the lines look about the same for the different emotions. I should immerse myself more and hopefully the lines would come out more differently.
Also, I feel that within an emotion, there are varying degrees – for instance simmering anger vs exploding anger.
Group discussion consolidation:
Generally,
Happy – round lines
Anger – strong, violent, pressed harder lines
Sadness – most vague emotionally (broad) – different memories = different degrees/kinds of sadness. Within the group, all of us translated this different. Zhi Hong had spiky aloe vera like subjects; Yu Lin had foggy, charcoal like usage of pencil; for mine, my depiction of sadness is very similar to nervous+lonely
Nervous – there are differences between the 3 of our takes to it, but the differences are more subtle compared to the sadness ones.
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