blogsandprocesses

[blogsandprocesses]

Ideas, Processes And Hopefully A Bright Future

The semester has come to an end. And quite honestly, I learnt way more from this class than I would have expected.

For one, I definitely think better now. Not just visually, but it has also taught me how to streamline my thought process so instead of it being vague with no destination, my route proves to be fruitful to my ideas.

A lot of the times before, I would try to document my process (mostly when I wrote stories) but in the end, the final piece that I wrote was simply just another draft. I just went with the flow, and ignored everything I wrote beforehand. And while going with the flow isn’t necessarily bad, I have learnt that there is a certain way to do it.

Secondly, I have taken a step towards being confident in the work that I present. I worked hard, and even if the end product isn’t as good as I would have liked it to be, I have started to hold pride in my hard work. I think back to all the times I didn’t work hard and got really bad results (most of my A Levels life, basically) and when I compare the guilt I felt then to the slight dissatisfaction I sometimes feel these days, I am able to persuade myself to work harder. After all, this is the major I chose for myself.

Over the course of this class, I have also made a conscious effort of comparing my work to everyone else’s. Although there are times when I can’t help it, I’ve learnt that it doesn’t really bring you any good. And to be honest, in this class, even as we worked on the same prompt of an assignment, there was nothing to relate when it came to the end results. It still astonishes me when I think of how differently all of our creative senses work. Everyone has a separate way they approach things. If we all took different routes, is it really fair to compare?

In conclusion, I can safely say that this was my favorite class this semester. It did threaten to break me at times, with the amount of thinking involved, but I don’t think I would have liked it the same if it didn’t. And so, here I say farewell to the amazing fourteen and a half weeks of my first semester. Here’s hoping it was my first significant step into the field of visual thinking.

[blogsandprocesses]

Hansel And Gretel ft. Evil Scientist and... Cyborgs And Stuff

The last assignment, worth double the points. And would you look at that, it involves drawing characters.

The last week, the last assignment. Bittersweet feelings but I was also strangely very excited when we found out what the assignment was going to be. It was visual fanfiction, to put it shortly (not the weird fanfiction, the other kind, where your story takes most elements from an existing story but a special twist on one of its features effects the entire thing…that kind). And let me tell you, the hardest part was picking out a story and deciding how I wanted to change it.

My first thought: Let’s change Ariel from being a mermaid to an air spirit (a sylph, to be precise)! There will be this beautiful visual of her saving the prince from a plane crash as she brings him to safety in her arms.

My professor: That’s not changing enough.

And sadly, I could not refute. As I listened to how the other people were changing their story, I got a clearer idea of what exactly we were supposed to do. The problem was the ‘creator’s’ block. It was as real as it could be. My mind was totally blank.

But here’s a little fact; most great ideas come after midnight. As I went to sleep around 2:00 in the morning, it hit. I knew what I wanted to do. I was going to send Hansel and Gretel to the future! And I was going to make the evil witch into an evil scientist who wanted to tear apart kids and make cyborgs (the original lady wanted to devour a freshly roasted Hansel as her dinnertime meal, no idea could get darker than that). Anyways, after I got the green signal from my professor, I started my research. And yet again, I had to hold myself back from hitting my head on the table. Futuristic cities are really hard to draw. And I had to do it using traditional art, because I had no access nor experience to do it digitally.

I drew a few (eight, to be exact) sketches in my sketchbook, each slightly different but all highlighting the same features of the story. And after finishing two of my essays that I had to write for other classes, I began working. With paint. At the same spot. For hours.

I decided to paste the buildings I make, giving it a collage-ish look (although it may look like an artistic choice, it was done so I had a smaller chance of ruining the entire piece all at once). But in the end, the result looked almost decent.

It was my last assignment, and I definitely have regrets. But once again, it wasn’t too bad.

[blogsandprocesses]

I Made My Sister Into Art

Abstraction is hard. Especially as an assignment.

You see, I have a sister. We’re close, but also polar opposites, so we tend to get annoyed by each other a lot. But of all people, I would claim that I know her best.

So when we got the assignment that we had to make an abstracted piece of an actual person, she was immediately the first person that popped into my head. And I’ve always been the kind to circle back to my first choice, even if I force myself to think some more. So, in the end, my lovely little sister became the subject of our new assignment.

I wrote my written piece first, after listing down every possible trait that she owned (that I could think of) in my sketchbook. For the written piece, I decided to tell a story, using a third person voice but making my sister the main character. I summarized her personality in reference to what a typical day looked like for her, and then, once again, came to the conclusion that she was a very complicated personality.

There was only one think I had in mind when I thought about her: TRIANGLES

That was it. I made a piece with that in mind, after doing a little research on colors as well. The background, I made with purple and red, to show the pride and anger she seemed to radiate a lot of the time.

I didn’t like that piece at all.

A)     It looked pretty bad

B)     It just… didn’t feel right.

It clicked a little (a few breakdowns) later that the reason it didn’t feel right was because it almost seemed to be portraying a villain. But that wasn’t the case. What I wanted it to portray was how most of her behavior was a result of her immaturity. She didn’t yet know how to display her negative feelings in a mature, grown up way. And that was why she appeared the way that she did.

And with that epiphany, more research followed. After a day, I started making my new piece. This time, I made the base color yellow, and added touches of white here and there. I still included the red, purple and black, and also the triangles, but this time my piece depicted a story of how her personality was the way it was, giving a more human like element instead of simple displaying a one-dimensional character sketch of a terribly written character. This one felt more…real. And I liked that.  

Although my level of skill was still not up to the mark, I wasn’t disappointed in my thought process. The visual itself could have been neater (in this case, it would be more of a ‘messy but skilled’ piece) and that, quite honestly is my only dissatisfaction. But hey, practice is key, isn’t it?

[blogsandprocesses]

The Time I Was A Vase Expert

With my lesson newly learnt, the first thing I thought about when I heard the assignment was how I was going to present it. But then I told myself to hold that thought.

My object was a vase, and this time we were supposed to do a conceptual iteration – making different versions of our object using different materials but keeping its function the same. And so I thought. And thought some more. The fact that my different versions of the vases would, in the end, look like different products to sell at an interior décor store was quite apparent. And so I took that idea and decided to do a little catalogue.

I made a table, separating the vase into three different parts, the base, the holding thingy (the original object had a Styrofoam ball for that purpose) and flowers. And then I went crazy with it, listing all kinds of materials that I could possibly think of. In the end, I chose the combinations that could actually pass as products in real life. I also tried to think like an actual product designer, thinking of how it would make more sense to target a separate group for each of my products to make them unique and versatile. With that, I started doing more research on vase shapes and products because I planned on presenting them in a way that an actual catalogue would (I read a few of those too).

After that, I started drawing. At this point, I knew almost exactly what I wanted to do, making my work way easier. Even if I decided to deviate from my original plan a little bit, it didn’t affect me too much. I definitely knew what I was doing at this point.

For the last piece, I had to do some extra research because my plan was to provide the audience with a small surprise element. However good a project may be, it is always essential to add that little element to make sure they remember, as a double reminder that yes, you did see this. I searched up a tutorial on how to make your own little vase and drew the entire DIY instruction table on my last page. It didn’t turn out exactly the way I want, but sadly, I couldn’t bring myself to redo it. I just flipped back, saw how satisfied I was with the first page, and put the booklet down. I felt mostly satisfied, and to be honest, that was as good as it was going to get. Even with skills I believe myself to have, I have never been entirely happy with anything. And so, I was content.

I ended up getting a really good review on the assignment too. So in conclusion, I believe that this one went really well.

[blogsandprocesses]

Fifty Shades Of The Same Vase - I Also Learnt An Important Lesson

If the previous assignment taught me patience, this one has turned me into a whole damn monk.

Fifty iterations, all in a week. And that too, instead of choosing a simple object, I decided to go with a vase. Just...because. Three days into the week, the weekend passed, and I was only done with around twenty. I had scoured my entire house for any art supplies I could find, sadly only ending up with two oil pastels, a set of brush markers and half a color set. That was all, and I had used everything.

The next step was another trip around the house, this time looking for different materials for media. I tore up some cloth from a bunch of leftover material, then went around mutilating every possible item I could find. Hell, I even went and cut up some innocent leaves.

The next step was to go around Pinterest (again) to look for possible patterns. I zoomed into the abstract art at the back of some interior design photo and tried to imitate the same thing with color pencils. Didn’t work out too well, but hey, at least I had one less iteration to go.

By the time I was done, I realized that I hadn’t planned how I was going to present this. In the end, I cut up each individual piece in messy box shapes and set them together, hoping that they would somehow look like a little flower garden. Spoiler alert, it didn’t.

And so I ended up losing a few marks on the presentation. But hey, at least that taught be to be careful later on. Presentation: Important. 

[blogsandprocesses]

I Can Tell Stories but I Cannot Draw

I started writing stories when I was very young, and I probably started lying even before that. So, in a sense, I’ve known storytelling for a long, long time. Even with words, I always found telling true stories harder than making stuff up. And so, when I heard that our first formal assignment is to tell a true story visually, I almost hit my head on the table (I had a feeling that I would continue to do that with every new assignment we got). 

Here’s something about me; I lazed through most of my art classes in school. We had one every week and the ten-year-old me just wasn’t a fan. I got interested in art around the start of my O Levels so I started drawing a little but soon, I had to give that up for the sake of the monsters I still shudder at the thought of: Chemistry and Add. Math. Long story short, I don’t really know how to draw. But I have come to the point where I really, really want to.

We were to pick an object of our choice from a list of our belongings in our previous assignment. Of all the objects that I wrote down, only one attracted attention. And that was the giant, pink and purple cupboard that stood in my room standing out like a sore thumb. I mean, it would stand out to anybody really, it was a no-brainer really. And so that’s how we chose our object.

I realized soon after that most of the objects people had chosen were something they held close to their hearts, and I almost laughed about how I would want nothing but to throw mine away. Flashbacks to the many, many times my sister and I had tried to convince – begged, actually – our mother to sell the cupboard, or at least to get it colored. And that’s how I decided on the story I needed to tell.

Deciding on the story was relatively harder than deciding on the kind of story that I wanted to tell. A children’s story book! I had loved them ever since I was a child. The simplicity of the drawings, and that of the stories on one side, and the mere aesthetic of it on the other, they all have always attracted me. And so, the thought process was over.

It was now time to get started. The first step was to spend some time on Pinterest, browsing through character designs and deciding what kind of character went best with the story. I tried drawing a few, giving up midway for a few of them because I couldn’t handle any complex ones. Finally, I had two designs decided for both my characters, my sister and I - or Mona and Zee - as I planned to call them.

But now we had a problem; there was only a little time left. Surprise, surprise, I suck at time management. But in hindsight, as long as I submitted the assignment on time, did it really matter?

I wrote down the entire story on my sketchbook.

Once – too long.

Twice – still too long

Thrice – I think this works!

…I ended up not writing the third version either.

I started once and then merely went with the flow. With every passing hour, my anxiety increased. I grew frustrated very often, with the amount of times I had to erase a character and draw them again. For one, this assignment taught me patience.

But one character after another, I was done with the drawing. I started writing then, but I ended up making a few errors which I noticed later on.

The first thing I learnt through this assignment: start stuff beforehand. When you rush, you mess up.

The second thing: Make rough sketches. I ended up unsatisfied with a lot of the final product, especially the title page of the storybook because I hadn’t made as clear of a rough sketch. Although I had drawn the art beforehand, I hadn’t put a lot of thought on where the text was to go. And so the main page ended up looking somewhat...off.

But overall, I would probably say I didn't do too bad. Considering my experience - or lack of.