Today in class, we went outside and got examples of texture. How we did this was by taking a thin sheet of paper and oil pastel chalk then placing the paper over an interesting texture and then shading over the paper with the chalk. The ten sample I collected were from an air vent, a cement wall, the ground, a picnic table, a fence, a rubber pipe, metal on the ground, a vent, a trash can, and a sign. After we collected our samples we went back inside and tried to draw 5 of the textures we collected. I tried to do this by having darker areas and lighter areas. However, it was a lot more difficult than I had expected.
Creating our Matisse inspire cut paper designs was a very long process. The first step to creating these was to choose two sources of inspiration. I chose to use jazz and Egyptian culture. After we had our inspiration picked out, we had to do a little bit of research on these and then print out some pictures as resources. Using our resources, we then had to create a total of eight thumbnail sketches (four for jazz and four for Egyptian culture). Next, we drew two final sketches based off of our favorite thumbnail sketches. I decided that I liked the way my jazz sketch turned out better so I decided to use that for my final product. After making that decision, I had to trace my design onto a piece of tracing paper and transfer it onto a black piece of paper. In order to see which areas would be black and which would be white, I used a white colored pencil to color in my designs. I then took my X-ACTO knife and a cutting mat and cut out all the white areas. There were many techniques that I learned about during the span of this project. The main new material that I used was an X-ACTO knife. I had never used an X-ACTO knife so this was an entirely new technique to me. While watching Ms. Rossi demonstrate using the X-ACTO knife, it seemed like such a simple and effortless thing to do. However, it was nothing like I expected. Keeping my hand steady while applying a significant amount of pressure was a difficult task for me which caused many jagged cuts. Cutting curved lines was also difficult as sometimes my knife would get off track and create a wider curve than I had hoped for. I did feel a little bit better about using it after cutting out some of my shapes and such. I feel as though if I had gotten some practice with the X-ACTO knife before using it on my final product, I would have felt more comfortable with it and would have had neater cuts. I hope to use an X-ACTO knife again so I can gain a little bit more experience with this new tool. I also faced many challenges while cutting out my final product. For example, while coloring in my design, I ended up coloring some areas that were supposed to be black, white which resulted in a very unappealing final product. I was convinced that I would have to recut my entire design, but then I realized that I could just turn my paper around and have my design be backwards. Another challenge I faced was that many of my pieces fell out while cutting out my paper. I was worried that the pieces would get lost or something of that matter and I wouldn't be able to glue them down onto my page. Luckily nothing was lost and I was able to incorporate them into my final product. There were a few other minor challenges I faced but overall, creating this project was fairly successful. A lot of planning went into creating this project. First of all, there was a lot of planning that went into creating the sketches. You had to do research and find inspiration merely to begin sketching out designs. Also you had to think about how to get the white to stand out and not just blend in with other areas of white. There also had to be areas of color switching and other techniques. I didn't actually realize how many thin black lines had to be cut in order to keep demension and definition to the white areas until I started to color in white areas on my black piece of paper. I think that as long as you planned out what to cut and all that stuff before tracing everything down, cutting wouldn't be too much of a difficult process. I, however did not plan sufficiently and wound up almost cutting out every single one of my piano keys. That's the reason why I was left with so many white marks of the front of my design. All in all, I think that this was a fun and creative first major project and I am glad I got to gain new experiences. |
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April 2015
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