Author Archives: Klarissa G.

Museum Visit Project

For my museum visit project I went to the MoMa and I chose a sculpture called Hanging Column created by Louise Nevelson in 1959. This piece was part of a bigger installation titled Dawn’s Wedding Feast.

 

The works of my own that this sculpture reminded me of were projects 1, 2 and 3.       .

Project 5 – ImagiNATION

For this project I went out and searched for interesting objects and shapes on sidewalks. I had plenty, but these are just some of the ones I found:

       

In class I came up with some ideas for how to turn some of these objects and shapes into type designs. I tried visualizing them as letters and then thought of which words I would want to use for each composition.

       

Then I went back to the same sidewalks and used the same shapes as starting points for my designs. These are my end results:

   

To me they are all readable, but the middle one that reads “good” is a little harder to see. It bothers me that I couldn’t make it better because it was my favorite one to sketch out. It didn’t work out as planned because the concrete near the metal circle was full of pebbles and that was not something I had thought about before going back to the location. It was hard to draw on that surface.

I wasn’t able to get the letters of my “ugh” design to be as thin as the object but I think its okay. For that one I also had to fill in cracks with orange because if not the empty spaces of gray made it look weird and patchy.

My favorite composition to do in the end was the third one that reads “john” because in a way it was the most elaborated one and I feel like it just works best and actually fits in with the object/crack on the sidewalk that i designed it with.

This project wasn’t difficult to do in itself but it was work. I had to do them at night while relying on street lamps and flashlights. I feel like having done them at night worked in favor of my “good” composition because when I saw it in the daytime, the metal circle looked one bright and glossy shade of gray and everything I added in chalk looked darker. But at night with the few lights around it, it was more reflective and I drew my sketches and my compositions to look like that. I realize now that I didn’t think about the fact that the circle would be bright gray in light because I first took the photo of it at night too. So it makes sense for me to have done the chalk-work at night as well. This same thought applies to the other two compositions.

The process was tedious and a little nerve-wrecking because every time someone would pass by me while I was working on it I thought they might say something about me drawing on the sidewalk. But they didn’t. That made it a little fun too.

In the end I’m stuck between loving what I made and feeling that I could’ve done it a little bit better.

Project 4 – Color Your Selfie

I don’t consider myself to have a favorite color but for this project I decided to go with Blue-Green because for me it’s a pretty color and it resonates with my personality. Also when I think back to when i was a teen, given the choices of objects that came in different colors I would almost always choose this one.

This is the black and white selfie that I’m working with:

And these are the color schemes that I used to make the complementary, triad and analogous compositions of my selfie. I used a color wheel to choose the corresponding colors in each kind of composition and searched for them and their CMYK numbers in a Pantone book to help me find them easily in photoshop and illustrator.

Blue-Green is a color that is used to symbolize water, tranquility, intuition, communication and wisdom. It is a mixture of Blue, which has calming properties, and Green, which has growth properties. I like that it is a mixture. I’ve never really liked straightforward primary colors. And I feel that being calm and at least trying to have good communication and trying to be smart is something that I always do. I also love the ocean and looking at it. Living on a island for a long period of time showed me the different kinds of blues the ocean could take on, and Blue-Green is the nicest. It’s just a color that gives me the most welcoming feeling.

And using Blue-Green and its complementary, triad, and analogous colors, I chose to make my compositions like this:

       

This project wasn’t hard but in order for it to come out right you need to really follow the steps for it to come out right. I had to re-do my main contrasted black and white image many times until I was satisfied with it and until it had no more grays. And I had to switch my colors around in each composition until it felt right or until it was more visible. I also feel like I learned a lot about the use of color for designs. I now notice other designs in real life and think about how they use analogous or complementary colors for their work. Before I would think that people just chose whatever colors they wanted for their work but it makes sense that there is more meaning behind it.

 

Selfiemotion – Klarissa G.

For my Selfiemotion Collage, these are 3 of the sketches I tried out:

      

The mood I chose to portray is Fear. To me Fear is mainly expressed by the eyes, but then also followed up by the eyebrows and the mouth. When I feel fear my eyes open up wide and I raise my eyebrows and my mouth stays in a pout. But I know more people would express fear with their mouth open in some sort of stressed way. In my sketches those are the elements that I tried to play around with. In my sketches I wasn’t so successful with the motion and contrast of the different elements.

And this is what I ended up making as my final work and my grayscale:

I think I was able to achieve the fearful look although I know some people might think the expression I created looks more disgusted or surprised. I added different sized and contrasted elements (eyebrows, eyes and mouth) in order to portray a pulsing kind of motion and to represent how when I feel fear I feel shock and even though my eyes widen, my emotional side starts to shrink inside. Thats also why I decided to make the lower part of my chest get smaller as it goes down. I made my grayscale into a collage like my photo with the remaining scraps of my black and white photographs. The whole project was interesting and little tedious to make. But it’s something I had never done before so it was fun. I didn’t want to use other photographs that weren’t of my face, but maybe that could have helped me push out the expression a little bit more.

Texture and Pattern Project – Klarissa G.

For my Texture and Pattern project I chose the Pasta photo(Fettuccine-looking one) as a texture and the Chain-link fence photo as a pattern.

To me the Pasta image makes me think about a messy situation, stress, something that is all over the place, and unorganized. These were some of my initial type and line sketches for it:

      

The Fence image is a pattern in perspective and it gives me a more unified feeling than the Pasta image does. It also gives off an oppressive mood because of the nature of the image. These were some of my sketches in line and type for it:

      

In the end I didn’t necessarily go with all my sketch ideas and in some cases I just ended up making a whole new composition. But in a way my sketches helped me decide what I thought could and could not work to make my final compositions, or what I needed to change to make them better.

These are my 4 final ink compositions:

   

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For my Pasta compositions I did a good job and I was able to show the contrast necessary to show depth. For my Pasta made with lines I decided to make each element like a continuous line going inward. They almost look like shapes but if you look closely you can see that they aren’t connected. My lines did touch a little in some places, and thats something I wish I could’ve done better. For my Pasta made with type I decided to fill the spaces with sentences/words from lyrics, going in different directions and using thicker and thinner fonts for the lighter and darker parts. This one is my favorite.

For my Fence compositions I’m okay with what I made but I feel like they could’ve been a little better. For my Fence made with lines the contrast is visible to me, but I question if it could have a larger contrast. I felt like one of my sketches came out better than my final composition. For my Fence made with type, I actually really like my idea. I made the fence using the words “dead end” and “warning”, while using the word”freedom” to fill in the background. I feel like there was a little white spaces in places there shouldn’t be, and that some of the type isn’t understandable because it might blend in together, but overall I like it.

Making this project wasn’t easy. It was very tedious and it was hard to come up with ideas that I felt would actually work. But at the same time it was a little fun and I liked that within the boundaries of what lines and typography styles we could use for this project, it was still broad enough for everyone to bring in their own creativity.

 

Project 1 – Lost and Found

Klarissa Grullon

 

This is an example of an obvious foreground-background relationship. Even though the black is prominent, I don’t think it takes over the gray’s space. It makes me think of islands and archipelagos scattered through an ocean.

These shapes were made by someone who was trapped at the workplace they loath for a 9-hour shift, while they were using the restroom during their break. They just sat in the bathroom stall, prayed that nobody would come in, and scratched away at the stall door. They carved big shapes and super tiny shapes, all random and near each other, until they saw what it became: a tiny continent. Then they wished they could quit their job and go live freely in their own little world.

    

This example is of an ambiguous foreground-background relationship. There are bulbous, round organic shapes with some parts looking a little rougher and more linear. The crack in almost the center of it doesn’t add on to the shapes but I think it still makes an interesting composition. The shapes together make me think of splats, bubbles and drops.

This came from the aftermath of earthquakes, tsunamis, landslides and even acid rain on the hardest and strongest concrete known to man. Any other kind of concrete would cease to exist after having gone through the same disasters. This one, instead of crumbling apart, just scarred. These shapes are scars that show how strong it really is.

  

Here we have an obvious figure-ground relationship. The light space is much larger than the dark one. The dark shape is geometric and looks like a crack. Some of the chipped off edges are a little rounded up. This shape makes me think of lightning.

One day at home, I was in my room when I heard a loud crash. When I go to check what had happened, I see that my sister’s boyfriend dropped the blender while making a smoothie. After he picked up the broken blender and pieces of glass, I could see this crackled shape now visible on the kitchen floor. To this day, this crack serves as a reminder that my sister’s boyfriend is the reason why I can’t make smoothies at home anymore.

  

This one is an obvious composition. The foreground has an overall geometric circular shape. When you look closely at the edges of it you can see how it is more loose and organic, instead of uniform. I like the constant jaggedness of this shape.

On a magical night, the moon shined so eminently that its light transversed itself through the window and engraved its own composition on the wooden panels of a New York City apartment.

  

This is an ambiguous foreground-background relation. This texture is known to be seen on and come from trees. It looks like psychedelic oval shapes of different sizes and thicknesses being spread on top of one another.

This composition was born inside a tree. The first filled-in oval shape that you see in the center is the first size that it ever grew up to be. The layer surrounding that one is what its next phase of thickening growth turned out to be. All the following ones continue on to show us the tree’s life span. In order to become a grandiose strong woodwork, this tree first had to be a small, weak sapling. It is the tree of inspiration.

  

To me this is an ambiguous composition, as the dark and light parts are almost equally sharing the space they’re in. The light parts wrap up the dark parts. The consistency of both parts against each other make it a strong composition.

These shapes make up the ribs that hold in a walls heavy lungs and the abyss of darkness deep inside of it. The room these lungs belong to is never a fun one to be in. Whoever spends the night in it is always uneasy because they cannot stop looking at the walls ribs and wondering if that’s where they hear heavy breathing coming from. Little do they know, it’s exactly where it’s coming from.