Death By Design

There’s lots of different ways to learn things. There’s lots of different ways to teach things. There’s lots of different ways to do things. The more ways that one knows the better. But there is one way to act towards each other and that is with respect. Unfortunately some instructors, design aside, are just shit people. For whatever reason they think their way of doing things is superior to others. Maybe they don’t think that, but they come off that way. And because of this, the level of quality of design instruction is extremely poor where I come from.

I chose to go to design school because I thought I would learn about the world through design. I consider myself to be rational and open-minded and willing to try new things provided people teaching me new things treat me as if I am an intelligent college student and not some punk kid from off the street that isn’t aware of subtle differences in key commands when switching from mac to pc platforms.

Unfortunately, some of the most intrinsically asinine people I have had to deal with so far are my instructors. Frankly I don’t give a shit how much experience they claim to have nor do I care about their political views their religious views or how many children they have. Why they feel the need to bring these things into the classroom and parade them around and subtly push them on me as if I’m some impressionable frat-party-going toolbag poser designers who listen to half-ass bands that support “To Write Love On Her Arms” and cry themselves to sleep at night because someone in critique was honest enough to say that their work was weak and that they should emotionally detach themselves from type and colors and grow a pair because type and colors are nothing but tools that are to be manipulated however the designer feels necessary is beyond me.

But these asshole professionals exist and they have fucked with me for the last time. They have caused me so much stress and grief that I’m at the point in my design education where I feel as if I need to start fighting fire with fire. I don’t try to be a pessimistic person overall, but it’s so hard to wait for these lackadaisical indecisive inauthentic individual design peers of mind fumble with their words in critiques or not speak up at all because they lack the motivation to overcome their own fears in their personal lives to bring something worth talking about for more than ten seconds in a class time. Seriously. I don’t know if it’s something in the water that these mouth breathing moron designer wanna-bees are drinking, but silence is turning into agony in critiques and poor quality prototyping is going to be the death of me.

And if Kent State University is so blind that they feel as if they can trust these idiot post-emo fags to tell the truth about how their instructors are in the class room then I think we need to bring in Rob Halford to whip their asses and remind them that they have “another thing comin.’”

Do they seriously expect me to feel as if I’m getting my money’s worth out of my education when 90% of class time is spent going over how Dreamweaver tool bars work and what buttons do and how to drag things like a fucking chimpanzee when they know that Adobe is going to come out with like three new versions of Creative Sweet in like the next 3 months and everything will be in different places?

What about our amazing department head who has a head so far up the ass of one professor with any credibility that we must add “Professor” when said credible professor is brought up in a conversation that said credible professor isn’t even present at?

The bottom line is this isn’t a problem with the curriculum or a lack of understand of design it’s a problem with the individual monkies that run the joint. Death by Design is now something that Maddox should be proud of and it’s all because of coward adults and fake-ass college students who need to put up or shut up. These twats and taint-lickers aren’t even worth my time. All I’ve ever wanted from school is a degree that says I know how to do something and to learn a set of skills that are practical and will help me in the working world. Save the enlightening moments for smoking blunts on the beach with a copy of Walden and shut the fuck up all of you. Sorry dear readers (not that there are any of you), but DxD is now officially keeping it real. Deal with it.

seriously though. they suck…

From “the wealth of human knowledge” (A.K.A. Wikipedia) available on the web:

An existential crisis may result from:

• The sense of being alone and isolated in the world;
• A new-found grasp or appreciation of one’s mortality;
• Believing that one’s life has no purpose or external meaning;
• Awareness of one’s freedom and the consequences of accepting or rejecting that freedom;

An existential crisis is often provoked by a significant event in the person’s life — marriage, separation, major loss, the death of a loved one; a life-threatening experience; psycho-active drug use; adult children leaving home; reaching a personally-significant age (turning 30, turning 40, etc.), etc. Usually, it provokes the sufferer’s introspection about personal mortality, thus revealing the psychological repression of said awareness.

An existential crisis may resemble anomie (a personal condition resulting from a lack of norms) or a midlife crisis. Sometimes, an existential crisis stems from a person’s new perception of life and existence.

When a person faces the paradox of believing his or her life important whilst thinking that human existence is meaningless and without purpose, cognitive dissonance occurs, overcoming many innate psychological and cultural defense mechanisms.

Analogously, existentialism posits that a person can and does define the meaning and purpose of their life, and therefore must choose to resolve the crisis of existence.

I’m at a pivotal point in my design student career. I’m done with my first two years and am now seriously looking at what it’s going to take to make a career happen with design…

Up until this point every post I’ve done has been of projects that have been completed long before the time of writing the article. So since I have written about every project I have done so far, I have nothing more to write about.

In a few weeks I will be starting my 3rd year as a design student at Kent State University. From what I hear it is an intense year. Projects get harder because there are more variables that become open to play with. More research needs to be done and not as much guidance is given from professors. We’re slowly becoming real designers!

So with the pivotal time in my design career comes a pivotal point in the style of this blog. Since I am really going to make an effort to keep up with my projects as I make them, the writing style will most likely change. The articles might be more in-depth since I will try and writing out my thoughts on my projects every step of the way. However if I am to busy the articles might shorten as well, leaving only a small brief to wrap up what I worked on. Hopefully the latter won’t happen and I’ll be able to keep myself informed about what I am working on as I work on it.

What definitely will change will be the order in which things are presented. Since I’ll be taking multiple studio classes simultaneously the subject of the posts will most likely overlap. Also since I am going to be learning more about web development, the look of DxD will be changing (with help from friends of course).

So now that we’ve reached a point where we can breath for a bit, I figured it might be a good idea to dive into why “death by design” was chosen for the title of this blog.

When I set out for my higher education I did not anticipate that I would study design, nor did I anticipate that it would be so time consuming. The combination of my interest in design and it being so time consuming and relevant to my life ended up totally changing the way I think and rendered a kind of “death” of the person that I was and I thought I would be. It’s kind of like when Obi Wan Kenobi describes how Darth Vader “killed” Anakin Skywalker, but in my case it was a good thing (if that makes sense). So in other words, I was consumed by the powers of design and the old self that I was died (in terms of how I viewed myself and what I thought I would do in life) and a new self emerged. But the new self is a good guy, and not a prick like Vader was.

Here’s to the next few years of VCD at Kent State University!

For the final project in d/i 2 we didn’t have much time left in the semester. I was relieved because life was extrememly hectic at this point and I didn’t have much time to work on this project.

The assignment was simple. We had to pick a theme from garden, coffee shop, or kitchen and create a greeting card-like illustration using a technique that Andy Warhol apparently came up with where you transfer your drawing from one surface to another using india ink (hence the blotchy lines).

As you can see, I chose gardens and went with some things that you might find in a garden. I only made one of them, and here’s what came out:

The only thing I wish I did differently was make the roots and dirt a different color besides black. It ended up being really heavy and took away from the rest of the composition. Other than that, this project went really fast and I was totally happy with the outcome.

Bugs and Birds

The third problem in d/i 2 was similar to the second except this time our subject matter was a bug and a bird. We got to choose the bug and bird, but we were required to do a little research and bring in examples of images that we found in books from outside sources.

We were allowed to use pretty much any technique that we could think up for this project when it came time to put the illustrations together. There had to be two illustrations again. One of the illustrations had to be an 8 x 8 square and the other one had to be a 7 x 11 rectangle. We were encouraged to show the bird and bug that we chose in their natural habitats and choose color triads such as: red, blue, and yellow, or orange, green, and purple ranging in all values for the final product.

Since I found out that I had a hard time working with paints and drawing in this class from the last assignment, I decided to try a different approach. I knew that I wanted to try a collage for this one, but I didn’t know how yet. I also didn’t have a clue about what kind of bird or bug I wanted to do.

I thought about owls for the bird, and some kind of moth or butterfly for the bug. I went back and forth for days thinking about what I wanted to do, looking at what my classmates were doing, and putting off going to the library to get some books on bugs and birds. In class, we were supposed to look at the work of several well known illustrators such as Eric Carl (the guy who made the famous caterpillar children’s books) and kind get inspired by their approach to illustration.

Subconsciously I think I was still hung up on the grid thing so I was immediately attracted to this one illustrator’s work (whose name has slipped my mind) who seemed to use simple shapes on a grid to make fantastic images. Once I sat down with my professor and discussed some of his work and then finally went to the library to get some books on bugs and birds, I started making some illustrations.

Composition has always been this mysterious lofty entity that I am having a hard time wrapping my head around. It seems like it’s full of rules that contradict themselves and some things working in some subjects but not in others. It’s always an uphill batter for me when it comes to making compositions. Here are my first attempts with the 7 x 11 board. One was with this random unidentified bird from my head and the other with a great horned owl, which I ended up settling with.

My first attempts of putting together illustrations were so sad. I wasn’t really inspired at the time and I think they turned out looking like bad episodes of early South Park:

I was really frustrated at this point in the project. I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do. I didn’t know how I was going to make my color triads work and I wasn’t so sure about the owl or what kind of moth I would be using…

Time was running out though and it was time for me to make a decision. I ended up going with the owl, but I ditched the original composition that I came up with and after a few more Google searches I found this beautiful moth:

It’s called the Rothchillde or something like that. On second thought, I don’t think that’s what it’s called it’s just the family of moths that it’s from… But I know it’s from Costa Rica and it looks like it would scream bloody murder if you stepped on it… Probably has a face like those bugs in Silent Hill…

Either way, I found this bug and I liked the colors (primary color triad: red, blue, and yellow booyah) and decided to make an illustration of one.

I was really fed up with the cutting out scraps of paper, but I did want to make a collage and I liked grids. So I drew up a grid in Illustrator and printed a few out to make my illustrations on:

Hexagons are everywhere in design. People seem to use them when they want something to look cool, cutting edge and techy. Usually I just end up seeing a bee hive. But since I was using it only as a grid, I didn’t think I would run into that problem.

The problem I did run into was sore and sticky fingers. What I ended up doing was taking sheets of different colored construction paper and making all sorts of patterns on them with different colored acrylic paints. Then I cut out one triangle unit from the grid as a template (which was about as big as the end of my index finger) and proceeded to cut out little triangles of pattern filled construction paper one by one with an exacto blade. It was the most tedious thing I had done in illustration, but I was actually proud of my results this time:

I didn’t get a grade that was as high as I would have like because I put so much time and effort into these things, but the reasons I got the grades I did was because of a lack of interesting composition in the bug one, and not enough really happening in the bird one. I can see that now and will remember that good illustration isn’t simply an interesting technique.

Fruit Spot Illustrations

The second problem in d/i 2 had me running to the grocery store and keeping pieces of unwanted food in my fridge for weeks. The assignment was to obtain several different pieces of fruit and other produce section foodstuffs to paint still life using watercolors. The final product had to be on 8 x 8 pieces of bristol or watercolor paper and be flapped with the standard tracing paper and black match paper. There had to be two illustrations - one sticking to the chromatic range of colors and the other in the full intensity to muted color range.

To start, we simply experimented with how we were going to approach solving the problem. We were encouraged to try different techniques in how we applied the paint to our paper. We were even encouraged to try other kinds of paper other than bristol and watercolor. The first week or two in this assignment was simply playing with paints and papers. We had fun. Here are my results:

I’ve always liked drawing with pencils and pens so that’s what I started messing around with. Just simple little sketches that I went over with micron pens with I was finished and then painted with some water colors.

I remember being very timid in this part of the assignment. I was constantly worried about if what I was doing was on the right track and if my final product would be any good. I think I have a tendency to over think things and it makes things harder than they have to be for me. That really set me back in this assignment because I didn’t do much more testing that what is seen above.

If I had to go more in depth I guess I could say that I was worried about going through my supplies too fast and running out of money. Or I was worried that I would spend too much time on this assignment and end up neglecting another one that was just as serious or maybe even more serious than this one. I don’t know for sure, but one thing is: I think too much!

So here are my final products. I’m not very proud of them, but I did learn a lot about how to work with certain mediums that I wasn’t used to working with and I learned that sometimes you just need to go with the flow…

I was trying to go with this worm theme. I think I wanted to introduce it because there was that same ongoing problem that’s been in all of my VCD projects with more than one piece where there has to be contrast between the pieces, yet there has to be something that ties them together. For these, I thought that having the worms in both would be that thing that tied the two pieces together. Looking at them now I can see that it isn’t very effective and ends up looking cheesy. At the time I was making these, I think I was so stressed out that I just said “screw it,” and I put them in the pieces. I remember feeling like the second one shown here was missing something. I wanted another layer in the overall hierarchy, and that’s what caused me to put the giant worm in the background. I had him eating the square stamp-like element to carry on with the theme of the worms eating the fruit, and to tie the layer of hierarchy he was on the layer of hierarchy the stamp-like elements were on. It didn’t go over that well in class…

Overall I was thinking about grids too much. At the time it was difficult to separate the differences of designing for classes like Typography and 3D Graphic Design from designing for illustration classes. Hopefully I will be able to distinguish between these differences in future classes.

Collage Series

Design/Illustration Tech 2 (d/i 2) continued with concepts explored in d/i 1, but added elements such as color and more abstract thinking behind projects. The first few weeks were spent going over color theory and making water color swatches to get us warmed up for what was ahead in the class. Once that was out of the way, we made a series of collages out of scraps of pretty much whatever kind of material we wanted as long as they were abstract compositions combining different kinds of color contrasts. The compositions had to be on 6 x 6 pieces of bristol and display all the design elements that have been discussed up to this point such as point, line, and plane, contrast, harmony, and balance.

I ended up going through some old magazines that I had lying around looking for pieces of color that met the problem requirements. In the first set we were to find chromatic colors that were of the same value key (i.e. low, mid, high) for one collage, and then mix different values for the next. I chose to go with a mid key value range for my common value range (because I found the most of it in my magazines). Here are the results:

For the next set we had mix chromatic and muted colors of varying intensities:

The final set mixed chromatic, muted, and fully saturated colors:

Eames Cards

The final project in 3D Graphic Design was more of an exercise than a full-blown project. The class I was in moved at a faster pace than the other sections and by the time we got to the end of the semester our professor gave us a break. Our assignment was to take a template (provided as an InDesign file by our professor) for a set of cards with six slots cut into them like the ones seen here:

All we had to do was find a subject of images that interested us to put on the cards. We put the images on one side of the cards and a logo that pertained to our image subject matter on the other. We could create our own logo, or we could borrow one that was already in existence. Once we had our cards created, we had to make a structure with the cards that could be abstract or representational. We were encouraged to explore variation in pattern and color with the images when constructing our card structures through alternation of logo side to image side and in the images themselves.

Several ideas about what to use for image subject matter and logos came to mind as soon as this assignment was given. These included philosophers and their famous quotes with a logo of my own creation, pictures of thrash metal bands and their logos, and various pieces of some form of digital art and a logo of my creation.

After discussing my ideas with my professor, I chose to go with two sets of 52 cards. One would showcase various pieces of vector artwork that I found intriguing, and the other would showcase Metallica. I decided to go with a logo of my own creation for the vector series and the sweet Metallica logo made out of the iconic spiky “M” in the Metallica identity.

Here’s what I ended up building with my cards:

I wanted to have a little fun with the Metallica cards. I found this cool toy of a stage and action figures that looked like they were made by Todd Mcfarlane that inspired me to make a mini stage with my cards:

My stage of cards:

The process of gathering images (courtesy of google images) was quite relaxing, and when it was all said and done I was proud of my cards. It was interesting to see what everyone else in class did too. There were all sorts of cool abstract structures and subjects for imagery and logos. And don’t worry, I didn’t sell my cards and make money off of images or art that weren’t mine. I just made the decks for class.

Pop-Up

Project three in this class was the most trying project I worked on in my student career so far. It was mostly my fault again by not giving myself enough time, but one thing that was different was that instead of not having enough motivation at the right time or not having interesting subject matter to work with I tried to make what I was working on too big and ended up with a failing idea.

The assignment was to choose a museum or place of interest in the state of Ohio and make a series of three pop-ups highlighting a specific event or attraction featured from our chosen location. We were shown several different approaches to pop-ups and the techniques that go into making them work and were allowed to utilize any of them. We were given plenty of time to decide how we were going to go about creating our pop-ups and shown different styles and techniques from several books and workshop projects that were brought in by our professor.

When the assignment was initially given to us, several ideas went through my head about what I could use as subject matter. I settled on the National Packard Museum (the Packard Company was a car company started in Warren at the beginning of the 20th century) which is located in my hometown of Warren, Ohio. I felt that this was an excellent choice because it’s relatively close to Kent and I’m familiar with the location, which would make it easy to visit and gather on-the-spot data and photography.

After looking at the several techniques and approaches to what was allowed for our pop-ups and doing a little research on what to focus on, I decided to use a rolling window shade technique and to make a series of them commemorating the transcontinental journey taken by the “Old Pacific” Model F in the early 1900’s. A rolling window shade is basically a piece of paper folded over itself with a rectangle cut into one side of the creased material. A complex manipulation of several materials including a strip of light weight paper, a small rectangle of thicker paper, and a slightly larger piece of thicker paper with a slot cut through it construct the inner workings of the shade that when pulled on with a connected tab give an opportunity for there to be an image that changes from one thing to another. In other words, it’s like one of those billboards that has more than one ad in it that you might see changing around and around in places like airports and malls.

I figured all this out relatively early in the time we had for the project. Now all that was left was to visit the location that I would be gathering data and photography from and then make the damn things. The latter is easier said than done…

I took a day off and went back to my home town to visit the museum that I would be covering. After a nice chat with the people there, a few pictures and a visit to the library to see if I could find any reference material to use, I sat down to figure out how I was going to make my series of rolling window shades work. I kept in mind all that I had learned from making the Type book on Ladislav Sutnar about keeping a sense of coherence between the set, but letting there be variation to keep interest in what was being offered in the overall series. This was all going fine and good, and for the most part I stayed on schedule. Then it came time to actually sit down and construct the objects that I was only conceptualizing about up until this point.

This is where the project got messy. The more I played with the construction, the more ideas I got about what I could do with it and the more time I wasted… I had several prototypes and even got a lot of positive feedback in class about a somewhat new approach to what materials I used. But in the end, I ended up trying to make versions of the rolling window shade that were just too big and ended up not working. I knew that it was a tricky technique to begin with, but I figured I would try it anyway…

Here’s what I came out with:

Shown above: The giant version of the shade that ended up failing next to the smaller version.

3 Above: The three I would have had completed had I known that it would have been next to impossible to approach constructing these things the way I was trying.

Above: Two attempts of the “shades” that go into the rolling window shade using different materials.

What I ended up doing was making a presentation in class about how the design process can go wrong if approached the way I did in this project and tried to sell my failure as a success by sharing the experience that I had failing to have a complete project. I figured if I was going to turn in a piece of crap, I might as well try to dress it up as nice as possible and turn it in on a silver platter. I ended up with a high average grade, which I thought was pretty good considering I didn’t even finish the project. Here’s the brief I gave in class regarding my flop:

This project was a trying one for me. I failed to execute and solve the given problem in the alloted amount of time. The reasons for this were plentiful. Despite falling short of achieving success in achieving the problem objectives, I feel that the experience I gained in this failure to be as valuable as having a well crafted assignment to turn in on time. The experience gained was a heightened insight into what can happen when unfamiliar techniques are implemented into a problem that was not fully defined on my part from the beginning, and learning about the said techniques along the way.

Fortunately, this mistake took place at the academia level of my design career and not the professional one.

I hope to be an example of someone who feels that they tried a new way of doing things boldly. Falling short yes, but able to be resilient enough to ask the questions of why I failed, looking into my process and procedures, and hoping to learn from their mistakes to better myself as a professional.

So instead of a fully completed project that inspires and “wows” my peers, I hope to share an in-depth glimpse into where failure can leave a weary, yet ambitious, student of design.

Attempted techniques:

When first thinking about how to approach this problem, I was not fast enough in determining what technique I would use. After looking over several of the examples in class I simply chose one that I found most interesting rather than thinking about how to best marry technique concept with my chosen subject matter. Refusing to heed the warnings given by my instructor on this matter, I was determined to find a solution that worked with my subject matter and technique of interest.

Sketching several ideas out right off the bat, I settled on the rolling window shade and thought that a series of three of these would best suit the problem constraints. The logic behind this was that if three separate techniques were utilized there was a strong risk that the project as a whole would lack coherence. I felt that by using the same technique with a slight spin on each piece, the overall project would have a balanced yet contrasted solution. The pros of this are the coherence and the functionality as a whole. The cons are each piece lacking originality on its own and seeming redundant.

I spent a significant amount of time learning the technique of the rolling window shade. This involved building it several times from the given template and observing its motion until it was understood enough to be manipulated to better fit the objectives of the assignment.

Once the technique was understood, I experimented with its manipulation but failed to prototype these manipulations enough to see if they would work if chosen for my final solution.

As time began to close in, I settled on a manipulation of the chosen technique that once completed did not meet desired craft and functionality standards.

When this was realized, I had virtually no time to re-manipulate the technique to find a better solution.

Subject Matter:

The subject matter chosen was the National Packard Museum and the exhibit they have there documenting one of their first automobile’s transcontinental journey. This was the “Model F” in 1903, quite a feat for such an early stage in automobile development and there being virtually no paved roads on which to travel. I chose to focus specifically on this event by creating a series of mock promotions commemorating the 10th anniversary, which would take place in the year 2013.

The reasoning behind choosing this subject matter was twofold:

A) The idea of motion in pop-ups and automobile travel seemed to be something that would provide for an interesting solution.

B) The museum is located in my hometown of Warren Ohio, which is relatively close to Kent making it easy to go and collect data and inspiration.

In conclusion:

I hope that it is noticed that a significant amount of time and thought went into this project even though it ended rough. I hope that my peers can learn from my mistakes and I hope that goes just as far as if I had turned in a complete assignment. I learned a great deal about design and what it means to design by see me fail in it. I often think about a quote by Latislav Sutnar:

“Design is evaluated as a process culminating in an entity which
ntensifies comprehension.”

Unfortunately I did not measure up to everything the process of design encompasses on this assignment. However, I know that I at least intensified my comprehension of what is involved in the process and will remember this as a learning experience, not as a total failure.

Bauhaus Sculpture

For Project 2 in 3DGD we made a model sculpture that could potentially go in a museum exhibit displaying information on something to do with the Bauhaus. We could pick anything that had to do with the Bauhaus and choose photography and type as well. Before I go on with how the assignment went together, I should explain about this “sculpture” because it’s probably conjuring up sorts of images in the readers mind that probably don’t look anything like what we had to make. The “sculpture” was merely three different sized rectangular boxes of whatever material we found easy to work with that could be assembled through various techniques. We could cradle the boxes, puncture them, wedge them, or have them intersect in almost any way that we could think of so long as all the surfaces of the boxes were either parallel or perpendicular to the ground. The dimensions of these boxes had to stay within a reasonable size, which I guess meant nothing like a really long pointy stick of a block and not a flat piece of paper kind of a box…

While picking out the dimensions of our three boxes and figuring out how we were going to put them together, we had to keep elements of design in mind. This included having contrast in size and rectangular shape between the boxes, creating an interesting shape in both the positive space of the boxes and the negative space around the boxes. All this was done with various kinds of paper or foam core or whatever we thought would be a good material to make this with.

It should be noted now that at this point in the assignment we did not know what would be going on our model sculptures. We knew at some point that we would have to apply graphics and imagery to the boxes, but we didn’t know what the graphics had to be and what the sculpture was supposed to function as. This created many problems for several students including myself because it was hard to make an abstract sculpture that was visually interesting without thinking about how the final product would function and look. On top of that, once we found out that we were applying subject matter that had to do with the Bauhaus movement, most of us were unhappy with the sculptures we initially created.

While I was figuring out what sized blocks I was going to use in my sculpture and how I was going to assemble it, I fell into the category of students who couldn’t help but anticipate how the final product was going to function and ended up creating a model that I didn’t think would work as well as I would have liked it to with Bauhaus graphics. I knew I wanted this table-like structure that would have lots of photography and imagery with captions underneath them. I wanted people to then be able to walk around the main table-like piece of the sculpture by having photos and imagery arranged in a successive manner in order to get viewers to move around the sculpture. I thought this would solve the problem of needing to create something that was interesting to look at from all angles. (Unfortunately this wasn’t as successful as I anticipated and will be discussed later.) Since I was relying heavily on the concept of having a table-like structure with graphics on the top of it arranged in a successive manner, the other two pieces of my sculpture kind of came on a little awkward. I had this table piece, and to contrast it I pierced it with a long pole like box. I figured a long pole-like piece through a table-like piece utilized contrast in an effective way. The third piece was stouter in comparison to the others and was kind of lodged onto the adjacent side of the table-like piece.

So now that I had my sculpture, I got stuck trying to figure out what from the Bauhaus movement I was going to try to portray on my sculpture. This is the part of the project that really stumped me and I took way too long trying to find something that I was inspired by and would work with my sculpture. I ended up settling on a painter by the name of Paul Klee because I was fascinated by his work in trying to find a way to bridge a gap between music and paining.

Once I did some research on him and got a few books on him it was almost too late to really play with how I would go about applying imagery and graphics. I figured I would feature a few of his paintings and sample colors from them for the color scheme of my sculpture. This was done with some success, but I wish that I would have given myself more time to create several approaches to get better feedback from my professor and classmates.

Here’s what I came out with:

I got a decent grade on the final project, but I knew I could have done better. It was the classic problem of not giving myself enough time… Looking back at in now I can see that relying on having the movement around the sculture be based on the graphics was a bad idea to begin with because the whole point of the assignment was to create a sculpture that was visually stimulating and have movement be created by the arrangment of the boxes not the graphics, which in a way were secondary. One thing I do like about the final product is the giant skecth of Beethoven that Klee did as a child that I found in one of the books about him. It was pretty small in the book, but with the combination of a copy machine, scanner, and photoshop I was able to bring it to life on the front panell of the stout block. I just love the way it glares at the viewer. Too bad I didn’t create a caption for him… Oh well, chalk another one up to procrastination.