Afishionados,
I thought I’d share a little bit of what I’ve been up to in my Design Basics 2D class this past quarter. At the beginning of the quarter, each student randomly drew the name of a musician from a hat. We weren’t allowed to trade our musician for anyone else’s and we couldn’t redraw if we didn’t like who we picked. The musician we selected was to be the focus of all our projects (whether we liked it or not). I ended up choosing Mozart, which ended up being both good and bad.
I don’t dislike Mozart’s music, but I don’t listen to it either. Other students had the benefit of incorporating song lyrics, photos of their musician, and album covers into their projects. Mozart, of course, doesn’t have much to offer in this regard.
One of our later assignments was to select an object that represents our musician and design five different styles using that image, including: negative space, outline, line drawing, weighted line drawing, and stylized. I went with a violin.
I found a high-res image of a violin on a stock photography web site that I belong to and used that as a reference. Here’s a scan of my stylized image. It’s completely stippled and, unfortunately, doesn’t show up well as a scanned JPG. I used a really fine point marker to make it and it looks much crisper in person, but you get the idea. Of the five required styles, this was my favorite. This and the other four violin images would serve as the basis for future projects as well.
For whatever reason, my professor is obsessed with photocopiers. A later assignment involved taking the original violin images and creating both plural and compound designs from them (Plural incorporating multiple copies of the same image and compound including two different violin images together).
I mention the instructor’s love for the photocopier because she stated that we were not to use the computer whatsoever for any of our plural and compound assignments. Instead, we were supposed to use tissue paper to trace and crop or original violin images and then (of course) photocopy the tissue paper to resize it we needed. From there, you can photocopy your photocopies, cut them out, and arrange them in your plural and compound layouts, then photocopy THAT image to create a final piece. Have you ever tried to trace a stippled image? I don’t know about you, but I simply don’t have that kind of fucking time, not to mention the cost of copying. I bent the rules to my favor and ended up using Photoshop anyway. I scanned my original stippled image, then arranged it in Photoshop to create my final piece. We had to do five compound designs and five plural designs. This image is one of my plural assignments, as well as my favorite of all ten pieces. The “flower” formed by the violins was a happy accident, and I ended up using this on my final project for the class (which I may post at a later date). There is simply no way to get this kind of result by using a photocopier (you can’t overlay the dots!).
Before “bending the rules”, I tried pleading with my instructor to let me use Photoshop. She wouldn’t hear of it. When I asked the logic behind her retarded decision, she said “Not everyone knows how to use Photoshop and the computer, and I want the class to be on a level playing field.”
Oh really? I suppose that’s true, but why should I be punished just because I do know how to use Photoshop and a computer? I tried to explain my logic to her. “Yea, but there’s a regular Olympics and a Special Olympics, and I’m not retarded.” I don’t think I need to tell you that she didn’t appreciate my analogy.
Here’s another one of my projects, this time an example from one of my compound images. I scanned my weighted line drawing and used Photoshop to arrange it with my stylized (stippled) drawing. I really like the contrast between the two images.
If I had to do this project over, I would redo the weighted line drawing to look less like a “horror” violin. If Time Burton had a violin, it would look like this. But, in what little time I had to draw it, I think it came out okay, and still ends up working in the end.
The final assignment that I had to do with my violin drawings was to create a repeating pattern. Again, Photoshop wasn’t permitted but you can see how long it would take to do this by photocopying image after image after image.
Here’s my final tiled piece. It’s the same as my compound image, but around a quarter of the original size (Each assignment had to fit within a 6″ x 6″ square).
I saved hours of pointless photocopying by using my good friend Photoshop once again. Although it only took a few minutes to do this, I’m really happy with how it turned out. If Mozart had to wallpaper his bathroom, this is the pattern he’d use. Or if he had gifts to wrap, or needed a Hawaiian shirt… I suppose I could throw in a couple palm trees to really make it work.
The instructor and I are civil to one another, but I don’t think either of us likes the other very much. She’s the only professor that I know of who teachers 2D Design and prohibits the use of the computer, so I’m sure this will be the last time I sign up for a class with her. But I don’t think the class was a total waste, as I’m really happy with how a lot of my assignments have turned out, not to mention that I’ve gotten really good grades on all my projects. So hopefully I’m doing something right! 
