Dot, dot, dot...

I just finished this current stage of the Dot Project. It so far reminds me a lot of last semester's lines and colors and negative space... :P Anyway, here's my write-up on our thumbnails and critiques:

After doing 10 thumbnails for each gestalt concept, proximity, similarity and continuance, we were charged with critiquing our table mates' dots in order to discover design patterns. We look for repetitiveness in the form of scale, distances, quantity, density and relational shift; looking for patterns in these areas is a good way to prevent one's self from getting in a design rut, so to speak. I was prepared to receive some constructive criticism, but was pleasantly surprised with how little work needed to be done. I did have issues with repeating triangles and pyramids, lateral designs and a slight over use of the number 4, all of which were fixed in the next step of the process, re-drawing thumbnails we were unhappy with. I ended up replacing 7 designs. From there, designs were narrowed down from 37, back to 30, then to 15, which were to be recreated on 6"x6" cardstock squares with sharpie and a circle template, due tomorrow. Which I just finished!
And here's my corroborating evidence! ;)

All in all, not too hard; very reminiscent of last semester, Basics of Design. :P Either way, it's all done and ready for tomorrow!


And here's a bonus, cartoon versions of my table mates and teachers! :)

Night!

~Emily
                                                        

We won the sphere battle...

But the cardboard war is far from over!


So, as you can tell, we finished the cardboard spheres today. Over all, a positive experience. Got shown up by some people, learned some new techniques, got some tips, but that's all to be expected. Lemme show you some of what went on... 


~~~~~~


When we got back from lunch this afternoon, we all knew it was time to start critiques the spheres. Some where more noticeably nervous than others... But we all managed to get through it, no tears, no hurt feelings. Yay! ;)

We started off with the "No Glue" spheres

Art is srs bizniz
...

Then we moved on to the structure spheres...

Look at all of 'em! Ain't they sumthin'? ;)

Ooh! Got a bit of Valerie there! (An office supply lovin' gal after my own heart :) )

I think that sphere belonged to a boy named Josh,
someone I had just met at lunch not even an hour ago.
It was pretty cool!

This girl wove this one for her no-glue sphere, like a basket.
So, it's a "basket"-ball...! Get it? *Basket* ball...? Haha :)

This one was made without any glue either! Just tabs and slots!
Amazing!

Hmmmmm...

So cool :)
Great job everyone!

 And here's some extra pics of me creeping on my tablemates-- I mean, people working!:

Naomi and Zack

Jada

Jeremy and Keenan

First Day Write-Up

Yes, yes, I know it's a few days delayed, but it took me a while to figure out 1) how this blog works (I only use the internet for Facebook and webcomics!! TT^TT), and 2) what exactly need to be put up here. You'll have to forgive the blase writing style here, I didn't know what I was doing, but I wanted to get it done. I'll probably either rewrite it or just do  better next time... :\

WASH Write-up Response

1/19/11

Today was the first day of studio class in WASH. Just walking in, you can tell it’s basically a warehouse full of art nerds. We were started off with the assignment of picking a new persona for the day; either a nightmare or a daydream, along with different parameters beyond that, such as male or female, animate or inanimate, age, job, etc. I chose to be a daydream; a young 1940’s heiress. After choosing a character, we were tasked with creating costumes and accessories out of newspaper and masking tape. There was some amazing craftsmanship!  Hats, helmets, claws, capes… even a life sized parrot and a newspaper baby doll! After our fashion show, we were given some information on our first large project, Larger Than Life; making everyday objects at a larger size completely out of cardboard. We’re due to make three different spheres by Monday. After lunch we got in groups and talked about quotes from famous people, whether or not we agree with them, and why. Not to speak poorly of my new classmates, but some of their logic behind their conclusions was, uh… creative…  which, I suppose, is a good thing in this class. After working our way through the syllabus, we studied tension in art and the basic principles of design and composition and how it applies to anything dealing with the senses, thought, memory, etc. This lead to the group assignment of personifying those principles through sound. My  group was given “point”, so we all stood in a group and just clapped once. Pretty self-explanatory. Some of them were kind of difficult to guess, but only once did the entire class manage to get it wrong. We were running close to the clock, so we rushed through the assignment of another project involving gestalt theories and dots; 30 thumbnails due by Monday, but not before discussing some very interesting theories, such as the idea that "all art is tension". It was a very interesting topic and once we started to discuss and think about it, I realized that it's pretty much true. All art is about tension in one way or another; highlighting tension, resolving tension, creating tension... it makes sense, huh? And when you think about it, everything in life is about tension. So, really, it was a great idea and a great thought to end the day with.

 All-in-all, it’s going to be a lot of work, but I can tell it’ll be very helpful to my as an artist and I’m sure I’ll have a lot of fun here! :)

Cardboard Spheres

Project 1: Cardboard Spheres, “Larger than Life”

I finally finished my third sphere this evening at the WASH complex. I have to say, thank goodness for that space, otherwise my roommate would hate me!

As soon as we were assigned the cardboard spheres, ideas began to form in my head; how to cut the cardboard, form it, fit it together… the whole assignment is about time and problem solving, really. Strangely enough, the first idea I got was for the third sphere, the one without any adhesives; I’ve done enough origami and put together enough cardboard toys to know how tabs and slots worked. But for chronology’s sake, let’s start with sphere #1…

Sphere 1, surface: This was the last one I did (I finished it just a few hours ago). I didn’t plan on procrastinating so much, but I really had no ideas at first! At least, not one that everyone else was going to have (pretty much everyone that I saw working at the complex was doing some form of paper mache). I woke up one morning with the idea of doing it like a soccer ball, you know, pentagrams in tiles? But I would’ve needed a protractor to get the angles right so it’d all fit together right, and it would’ve taken forever to do… plus, it didn’t really exemplify “surface” in anyway. In the end, I wound up taking chunks of board and gluing them together in circles, making a sort of bowl shape at first. The effect was a rough, chunky texture on the outside and feeling of constructing a bird’s nest (That’s really what it looked like up until I finished it!).  Regardless, despite a few shape issues, it all worked out and even though it’s a bit smaller than the other two, I’m actually pretty proud of it! Can’t wait to show it off tomorrow!

Sphere 2, construction: This was one of the first ideas I had and it was originally going to be my adhesiveless sphere, but when I got down to it, it didn’t work as cleanly as I’d hoped it would. Essentially, I took two cardboard circles and cut matching slits halfway through each one. Then, I was able to fit them together, ending up with two crossed circles. I meant to continue on in this fashion, slotting the circles together without glue, but I didn’t like how it looked, so I cut two circles in half, giving me (gasp!) 4 half circles, which I then glued into the corners of the two that had already been slotted together. Ta-da! This gave me a nice, star-shaped, inner skeleton of a sphere.

Sphere 3, no glue!: This one was an easy idea (the original, literally the very first idea I got, before Kelly even finished describing the assignment), but very difficult to actually assemble. It started off the same was as the last one, two circles slotted together, but with an additional two slots on either side of the first. Then, I took four more, slightly smaller circles and cut three slots into those as well. Long story short, after wrestling with some cutting mistakes (there’s no such thing as ctrl+ or command+ Z in real art!!) and some very stubborn cardboard (it made me break it! It was it’s own fault!!), I slotted everything together and got the nice little gridded sphere you should be able to see in a picture somewhere around here (hopefully).

And here's just some extra pics :)

So, there you have it! Got everything finished, chillin’ in my locker waiting for class tomorrow. Life lessons learned from this project: You WILL cut yourself and you WILL burn yourself. Knives are sharp and hot glue is hot and artists aren't the most focused people in the world. Go figure...

Anyway, I can’t wait to see what everyone else came up with in class tomorrow! Good night!

-Emily 

First Post

Testing, testing... first post, coming through!

Hey there, I'm Emily. I'm a studio art major in the Sam Houston State University Workshop in Art Studio and History program, which is why I have this blog in the first place.

This blog is a record and archive for my assignments, projects, write-ups and critiques through out the year. Hopefully I'll be able to post pictures and explanations of my work throughout this semester, as well as links to other students' blogs and the like.

Look forward to new stuff soon; WASH is a BUSY class!!

-Emily