As I wrote about in my previous post, I have been taking a class at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts called Fundamentals of 2D Design, taught by an artist who can be characterized by his giant walrus moustache, a thick Boston accent, and his vest with like a million pockets that he wore to every class. What was in those pockets? I do not know. Art secrets I guess. It's a mystery. Anyway, he was great.
So in this class we created work based on the elements of design: shape, line, value, color, and some other stuff. To do this, we stripped away all possible subject matter and meaning from our compositions so that we could focus on the elements of design only. This means that for most of the class we could only use squares, rectangles, equilateral triangles, and circles. We got to throw in biomorphic shapes later on.
My teacher often used a shapes-at-a-party story to get us thinking about how to place shapes within our compositions. For example, he might say something like this (you will have to imagine a Boston accent as you read): "What if you were the only circle at a party of squares and rectangles? Lets say a square invited you. You walk in and you don't know anyone. What do you do? How do you relate to those other shapes?" This metaphor came up every day for the first couple weeks. I always wanted to say, "Who wants to party with squares, man?" but I never did. I also am not sure how circles walk exactly. Would they not roll?
For this first assignment, we were all given two pieces of silkscreened paper: one with colorful stripes, and the other with curvy black and white shapes, and we had to cut them into 1"x 1" squares and create a 7" x 10" composition with them that unified the two aesthetics.
Then we worked with composition and also negative and positive space. I did this one in class-- then I wrote all of my homework for the next few weeks on it. I think it looks cool because I like my handwriting. Also, I learned a lot of lesser-appreciated but highly important skills like measuring out right angles and peeling tape off of paper without ripping anything:
For homework, we made more shape compositions with increasing numbers of shapes. I hand painted so many shapes. So many shapes.
Then we did some assignments where we used different line weights:
After doing all of our assignments in black and white only, we got the chance to mix them. We hand painted our own gray scales. I think mine came out pretty well. In fact, I believe it is the ideal grey scale. I attribute my knowledge of mixing colors in tiny increments to the semester I spent in New York City interning for
this guy, whose art involves a great deal of this particular skill.
After that we started incorporating biomorphic shapes, which are basically amoebas, and also intersections, such as in this little thing I did in class:
Then for homework, we combined biomorphic and geometric shapes with and without intersections:
We moved on to creating the illusion of space in our work:
This homework assignment was all about portraying shallow and deep space. I am pretty content with mine:
Then we started using color, which was super exciting because I love color!
This one has faces:
After that, we got to make any kind of composition we wanted with any colors we wanted! Hooray! Then we had to do the exact same composition again, but translate it all into grey scale based on the values of the different colors. Here's mine:
Now, every art student ever usually has to paint a color wheel at some point in their time at school. It is notorious for being one of the most tedious things you can paint and I actually never had to make one at Earllham. The universe wouldn't want me to get away with that now would it? Our next assignment was to make a color wheel in one day. I did not have time to perfect mine, so some of it is pretty good and some is kind-of off. The red-violet should be more red, the green-yellow should be more yellow, the blues and purples got waaaaay too dark on the dark end. Oh well. I tried:
The color wheel would actually have been super helpful for the color to grey scale assignment, but alas! We did color to grey scale first. After that we did color systems, like monotone, analogous colors, complementary colors, tertiary colors. I practiced with these shapes:
Then we used those same color systems in our homework, where we based the subject matter on a photo. I solicited photos from my facebook friends because I don't like making decisions, and a few people suggested some cool ones (thanks!), but ultimately decided to go with this photo of my friend Hallie, taken during our sophomore year of college:
This is the full photo. If I remember correctly, it was nearing finals time and we didn't want to do homework, so we had a vintage movie star themed photo shoot in our dorm room.
After that we leared about the world of tints, tones, and shades.
The tinted colors (color + white) are on the left, tones (color + grey) are in the middle, and the shades (color + black) are on the right.
I wanted to ask if this means that "tinted" windows should actually be called "shaded" windows, but I never did.
We used our knowledge of tint, tones, and shades, to make a number. The goal was to make the number stand out so that you see it first and not the grid:
Then we did that again, but bigger, for homework and also another number where you were supposed to see the grid first, before the number, but mine is just kind of psychedelic.
And that was all the things I did in my 2D Design class. After completing a senior thesis show at Earlham and selling artwork, it was a little weird for me to paint without the intent to create a gallery-worthy body of work, but that really wasn't the point of this class. I was familiar with most of these design elements going into the class, and so I feel like what I got out of it more than anything was the technical skills-- making perfect right angles, creating uniform margins, grids, measuring stuff, painting even, flat colors with acrylics (I prefer oil)... I tended not to do those things because they were boring and technical, but this class really forced me to sit down and just make a grid, or paint a straight line, so that was good practice for me for sure.
It also just feels great to be a student again. I like taking classes! I like homework! I like having goals! I'm a virgo! Yes!
I'm signing up for fall classes next week and I am looking forward to it!
