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My name is Alex Feng and I am going to talk about the process it took to get where my created designs are at. Prior to obtaining this assignment, I was first introduced to abstract objects which was my first challenge. I understood what the definition of abstract meant, but I found it difficult to creatively compose a piece of work that would look abstract. I would also question whether or not my designs were abstract or not, too. Then came another challenge which was to create a piece of art based on; loud, quiet, chaos, harmony, crowded and isolated. Lastly, I was also restricted to only use dots, shapes or lines which made the task seem more intimidating.
Honestly, I did not know where to start or what to draw which would look abstract, but then after the professor showed a couple of abstract pieces online I knew where to start. Firstly, I thought of everything that I have experienced that could related to those six words and categorize them into three groups. I put loud and quiet as sound, crowded and isolated as visual, and chaos and harmony as a feeling. Then I thought how could I relate those three categories to the restriction of only using dots, shapes and lines. After brainstorming and sketching for a hour or so, I decided to use dots with loud and quiet, lines with chaos and harmony, and shapes with crowded and isolated.
When I made the decision to use dots to create an abstract piece of art based on the words loud and quiet, the first thing that I thought of was music, but specifically the vibrations one may feel while wearing headphones. After debating whether or not I should base my abstract art piece on music, I looked outside the window to see it raining and then I made a connection. I pictured in my head water droplets hitting a puddle of water on the floor and the vibrations it would make. Then I quickly made a couple sketches in my notebook and knew that this was the pice I wanted to make for the word loud. However, my first design for quiet was not in unity with loud so I had to go back to the drawing board after a class critique. In the end, I simply made a duplicate of my loud art piece, but simply scaled the size of the dots down to create a harmony between my loud and quiet abstract drawings.
For isolated and crowded, it was initially way easier than I expected to create an abstract piece for these two words. According to the professor, my crowded piece was drawn on a grid while another similar piece from a fellow colleague executed it perfectly, by having the shapes overlap each other. At fist, hearing this made me kind of confused because my definition of crowded was objects touching each other directly rather than overlapping, but on my second attempt I overlapped my shapes to make it more crowded. As for my isolated piece, it did not seem isolated at first in general, but on my second attempt, I merely placed a individual shape in the middle of the piece and removed the surrounding objects around it to make it isolated while being confined in a space.
Lastly, for chaos and harmony I simply freestyle for a while in my sketchbook, but I found one particular design to be cool so I decided to continue it. Unfortunately, there was no critique on it because it was being covered by the projection screen, but I believe that in my first try that the two pieces were in harmony with each other which was what the professor stressed about. I based it on having a diamond shape in the middle with lines surrounding it going outward or inward to show harmony. That was my process of creating my six pieces of abstract drawings, but if there were any other issues that I ran into, then one would be actually using the gauche with the brushes. I believe my problem was simply the quality of the brushes that did not work well with gauche since the brushes I use are for water coloring, but clearly I must invest in getting new brushes that would make my drawings look like they were executed perfectly.
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