What is a line project final resolutions.

This brief has been handed in now so this is a catch up post on the work I did in the final weeks of this project.
First up a test piece that I quite liked, a 3D lettering experiment with strips of paper


The photograph was enhanced somewhat in photoshop but I wanted to keep it looking fairly natural.




This is the piece that eventually became the insperation for my final resolution, hand cut lettering in 3D




I realised that the shadows that were cast if I got the light at the correct angle added an interesting extra dimention to this so I played around with this photograph...




...And created this by tracing in illustrator. I was pleased with this, it has an unusual visual effect.




This was another test piece using a different photograph as a starting point and Photoshop to enhance rather than Illustator. At this point I was worried I was straying too far from the brief and decided to create a whole typeface in this cut out style.




This was the result, I liked this but I didnt want to lose the 3D element. I was desperatly running out of time by this point so I couldn't cut out and re-photograph these as I would have liked, so..





...I created this in photoshop to give a shadow/3D effect, this was actualy far more tricky than I thought because of the way vector objects are handled, but I wont go into that here. This is the finished resolution and I am happy with it because I feel this type design really developed for a reason, they are letters designed to cast a legable shadow when cut out. An odd reason but a reason all the same!

What is a line project update.

Well, I have done some work for this project (honest Amber!). I have been heavily influenced by an excellent book: 'Playful type' that I just knew I had to buy as soon as I picked it up. I was meaning to post up some of my fave works from the book, but its actually difficult because I like the whole lot! So I will just link to amazon and say this is a MUST buy if you are into hand made and creative letter forms. (its also now cheaper than when I bought it grrr)

Anyway moving on. This is a piece I created the other week that I have just got round to finishing in photoshop today. Its pretty self explanatory, I was playing around with string and drawing pins to use as a continuous line to spell out words, I have gone for an extreme high contrast black and white style to highlight the stringiness and take out the background, (well I know what I meant)

Not all the letters are very clear because of the joined up style with the 'A's being the biggest problem but it was only ever a test piece and I have since moved on so something which I think is going to be far better.

Finally, 

This is by far the best thing I have seen today: This guy is making a series of musicians portraits out of just unwound cassette tape, I dont know if he has a web site but he seems to be putting them all up onto his flikr account. Bod Dylan is my fave so far.

Found here

 

What is a line - rules to follow

Ok as requested, 3 rules I will follow for the remainder of this brief.

1) the work will be typographically based
2) The letter forms I make will start from something handcrafted (string, folded paper etc.)
3) I will then photograph my crafted type and enhance in photoshop for the final resolution.

What is a line: rethought and reloaded.

Well... I came to a bit of a dead end and got a bit fed up with this brief but we organized a mini crit yesterday and now have a completely new direction! Amazing, a crit that worked! I was going to base this on long exposure and photography but the sketches I was doing were all typographical so I am now going to explore that instead. Luke gave me a great tip: http://www.artyulia.com/index.php/Illustration# (The images won't copy over so you will have to click to the site) Some great work using paper curls to make 3D letterforms, that bear a resemblance to my sketchbook letter doodles, so I am going to try to see what I can make using strips of paper as my 'line'. I think this will be quite a neat interpretation of the brief if it works, and something much more crafty that I would normally try to do.

Also I am still going to have a go at pixel stretching as an alternative solution, Gareth has started some interesting work but has since moved on in another direction for his project. I want to at least learn this technique even if it leads nowhere for this brief. (click for gareth's blog post)
(Main inspiration: pixel stretching Designers Republic style, nice!)

What is a line brief proposal

I have chosen to follow the brief definition of line: 'A mark indicating position, connection or boundaries'.

I am going to investigate minimal style line drawings and also images made from one single line. I want to see how to create images that either made from, or highlight existing lines that are not immediately apparent to the viewer.  I also want to experiment with photography to create new lines of light with long exposure techniques. Hopefully I may be able to find a way of combining these techniques into graphical images that use lines in an innovative way. 

What is a line?

This is an interesting brief because this is such an open question. So far I have been looking at simple and effective line drawings, I cant say why but this one is a fave:

I don't know what purpose this illustration was intended for but I do like the simple but precise style. This defiantly says 'line' to me.




I have also been looking at drawing made from ONE continues line, The most advanced of these involve using computer algorithms and are called TSP art. this takes a bit of planning and knowledge to achieve but I think the results are almost hypnotic and I would love to have a proper go at one of these:

Images from: http://www.oberlin.edu/math/faculty/bosch/tspart-page.html
Detailed info on how these are made: http://www.oberlin.edu/math/faculty/bosch/making-tspart-page.html


I am going to do a lot more reading about these because I think this could be a way of making some quite striking graphic work

A bit late but....

Well yes I was meaning to put this up before the new year but I completely forgot, but well enough of the excuses, I have found it now so.....

Merry Christmas Everybody!!

Yup its the xmas card brief, My secret santa-carder was Will so I hope he is still displaying it with pride... I spend quite a while messing about with this, mostly because I dont like cards and wasn't feeling christmassy at the time so was quite resistant to the whole idea. In the end I went with a present themed creation with absolutely no sentimentality! The image was edited from a found photograph and simplified, duplicated and colourised. The text is a free font I edited slightly to fit together, using the counter of the 'e' in merry to serve as the dot on the 'i' in crimbo.

Visual Chairs

This was a visual language exercise to document every instance of a chosen object. I had chairs to do and I chose to take B&W photographs of different chairs at the same angle to make a sequence of images I hoped would be interesting when viewed together. This was only a very quick project and I had about an hour and a half to come up with the concept, take the photos and print them out. I even also did a drawing in this time as well, but I hated it so you wont find it here!

(as ever, click to enlarge image)

Weird Smoking Rabbit

This was a fun afternoon workshop. Picking random words and representing them with coloured paper and glue. The words I got were 'Weird' and 'Smoking'. 

This resulted in the blue Rabbit, don't know why I made that link but I quite like it!

'Happy' 'bear' and 'laughing' 'worm' didn't turn out as good as the rabbit,

Visual Literacy Task

Some examples of how graphic designers have used visual synecdoche, visual metaphor and visual metonym in their work.



This Poker site logo is a nice example of Visual Synecdoche, The designer has used the spade of a playing card to represent the game of cards. This works because the spade symbol is universally recognised and is only found in a deck of cards.