Month: January 2023

While I am a trained and working visual artist in the media of painting, collage, and drawing, I have spent considerably less time on those interests while I’ve been a student at Seattle Central. Without creating any limitations for myself, I hope to set aside 30 minutes everyday to create a collage/painting. While I hope to include gestalt principles and things I have learned about custom lettering, I want to be completely experimental and open about what I end up producing.

For reference, I will include some artists and artworks that I’m currently looking at

Project Description:

For 60 days, I will set aside 30 minutes to create a collage using art paper, acrylic paint and drawing tools, handmade stencils, painting mediums and varnishes to create sheen and texture.

The goal will be to explore wildly and not feel a need to focus on output, defining subject matter, or even a specific scale for the works. Because I’m mostly going from sketch to computer as a designer, this will give me an opportunity to get back into working with materials to create imagery.

Timeline:

Jan 27–March 27, 2023. 30 minutes daily collage and painting. 

Resources:

I would need to purchase more mixed-media paper, a set of acrylic paints, and continuously look for scraps of paper or other materials to work with. 

Cost:

The project would cost approximately $100 for the visual art supplies.

I chose to create an image of cascatelli pasta, a pasta noodle with a beautiful curved spiral. Because the pasta has such an interesting texture, I wanted to use my interest in typography to create the letterforms out of cascatelli noodles. To create this image, I used Photoshop to edit out the background of a cascatelli noodle, created a brush in Illustrator using the image, and aligned the brush to the type and ornament. My solution uses vibrant color to highlight the texture of the pasta and give off a luminous feel.

During Abdul Kassamali’s talk about his experiences producing films, he brought up the need to pivot and change direction when real-life challenges presented themselves. As a student in the SCCA graphic design program, I’ve thought a lot about how to both set high expectations for myself and let go of perfectionism, which has prevented me from taking risks in the past. During fall quarter, my approach to many of the projects was to try out as many directions as possible, then commit to an idea and work intensely before the deadline. Even though I feel like this approach has allowed me to explore more and test out lots of ideas, I recently encountered issues which made me rethink my approach to managing deadlines for projects.

For Jason’s Indesign class, I found myself tasked with creating an illustration of a word made entirely out of letters from that word (I decided to make a hermit crab out of hermit crab words. I spent the whole weekend before the Wednesday due date exploring different options, but caught a fever on Monday that left me exhausted and concerned about the project, as I had tons of work to juggle and also needed to rest to feel better. On Tuesday afternoon, I took an hour-long nap then spent tons of time on two different reference images: one image of a shell which I had tried to render in a photorealist fashion and another on the hermit crab itself, which I had pulled from an Illustration. Because I had another assignment also due the next day, I gave myself a 9pm deadline to complete everything. I decided that the style I had used for the hermit crab could be used for the shell and take less time, then I created the shell and decided to simplify the crab’s body. While I wish I had planned for personal circumstances such as getting sick, I feel good about how things turned out.