Friday, September 18, 2009

Design Elements/Lines - A Self Critique


My design element was "Scale" at first, and Jason had "Lines". He offered to change his paper slip with me and we did :D I was fairly happy with my scale exercise but not with my lines. So thanks Jason for the offer. It has given me the chance to re-do my line exercise and have a bit better snapshot to post.



In Line exercise, the objectives were:

-- To define, explore, and create lines of varying type, quality, direction
-- To create the illusion of spatial depth and texture
-- To explore lines ability to convey emotion
-- To gain experience using some of the basic drawing tools in illustrator.

I tried to create different type of lines with varying quality & direction and explored a bit more what the line is. My favorite part in exercise was creating the illusion of spatial depth by playing with blend tool. It was quite fun to draw very basics lines first and then fill in between. I didn't know what to come up and had fun. But it was a little bit challenging for me to work with lines to create a texture and emotion. My object for texture was close up of an old tree, but I think it looks more like a forest with thin trees and a sun behind. There is always a better one, especially if you are at the very beginning of your learning curve. Could be better but I am Ok with my texture. And creating an emotion was the hardest I guess. Since I love spiders and their nets, my hands unintentionally started to draw a spider net and a cartoon spider. What I felt afterwards were two, actually opposite, emotions. On the one hand, it gave me the emotion of being light but very agile and strong (for the hunter). On the other hand, there was a feeling of fear and falling in a trap (for a hunt). I think with my second try, I did better with lines and overall satisfied with what I did. I gained a little bit more experience with drawing tools in illustrator and gave a better demonstration of the Line element. I had some awareness about the importance of Line through photography, but hadn't had a chance to study it that closer. So this exercise taught me that Line is very simple to draw and work but could be the strongest element of design by carrying personality and expressing emotions.

2 comments:

  1. Hi Guzin! It’s Kayla. I am peer critiquing you. First of all, I love the image :). I feel you accomplished everything you were asked of in this assignment and more. You used lines to create everything and it really came together well. I absolutely LOVE your texture piece... you should have more confidence in yourself; it completely looks like a piece of wood! It's so rough and rigid looking, like it has been weathered over the years...congrats on making that look so great - I found that texture was the hardest to do in the line assignment. In your line type box I feel you have captivated all the different types of lines - straight, curvy, thick, thin, jagged, short and wispy. Good job. I also like your response to your emotion section with the spider, very though provoking. You managed to capture two emotions and two thoughts into one image which I think is important to the overall design. The spatial depth box was also well done, it created the illusion of 3D space and depth, and the dark color of the black kind of kept with the theme of sadness which I got from your spider (he seems lonely). Overall I think you did a great job on this assignment and I couldn’t have done it better myself!

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  2. Hey Kayla, thanks first for your comments.

    In my first practice with lines, I noticed that I misunderstood or misinterpreted the texture part, because I had drawn a pattern instead of texture and I didn't even notice that. How funny! I don't know what I was thinking or thought what the texture was but it wasn't correct. In my second try, I became aware of what I did it, explored texture more and got this one. I am very happy that you had the same feeling like I did when I was drawing the wood.

    And the spider...Under fragile, light and airy looking, it is one of the design masterpieces in nature. I think I had something different inside, but couldn't make it look better (still practicing and sometimes struggling with tools but I liked illustrator so far).

    At the end, I am happy with what came up and I am sure you will be doing much better things in a very short time :)

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