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.
