VISCOM1; Proj2 Reading Response

Framing was a critical role in the creation of this line book. Through framing of the images, we created the successful juxtapositions.  The way I framed something to give it an appearance of something something bigger, something that felt to extend farther than what it actually did to hep create certain juxtapositions. When working with continuation from one image to the next, framing was critical to draw the eye across the spread or any other direction needed to make the continuation successful.

Even though I don't feel that in my book I was focusing on positive and negative space directly, it is impossible to not think about it. When working with straight black and white you have to think about what is more dominant in the image or drawing. Being able to clearly show one dominant over the other is crucial to be able to get your point across successfully.

CD&F; Color Book Ideas

Clothing

I would take photos of different outfits with different color schemes. I could go a few different ways with this one. I could have all of the clothes modeled by the same person, someone that I know, maybe even myself. Or I could go out on the streets and find people with nice color schemes. I could also use my friends as models and have all my friends each wear a different color scheme made up of colors from their wardrobe. This could, and would, also incorporate the background colors to help with the over-lying color scheme of the images.

Ties & Suspenders

I own a heck of a lot of ties and suspenders, I could incorporate ties and suspenders into a neutral-based outfit like black shirt and jeans, or white shirt, or some shade of gray shirt. But then focus on the ties and suspenders making the color schemes, along with the background color(s).  This one probably would be a bit harder to pull off, but I really like this idea.

Books

I am not an avid book reader, but now-a-days I love to look at books, and their covers and the text inside. Pretty much every graphic design and typographical aspect of the book. But books can have gorgeous covers. I would not be able to use all the books that I have because I do not have enough books to do this, but Barnes & Noble sure does. That may be a little hard to be able to pull off, however.

VISCOM1; Line Book; Sequential Process

The hand-generated curved line studies were a very difficult process for me grasp well. Even once I was ready to turn them back over to the computer, I realized I still have much refinement to make to my line quality. Hand generating these lines first really did help me understand these line studies better. Made me realize why the line studies worked the way they did, from the angle of the curve, to how big it was. Even a very slight angle change could make a generated line study match or not match a photograph successfully.

Also, it is not possible to get very nice, controlled, curved lines from a computer generated image. Computers are not sophisticated enough(yet anyways) to be able to handle such delicate tasks, it is too clunky. That is where the hand and eye come into play to create the perfect curve. Once the curve is created by the hand on paper with pencil, it can then be put into the computer to be digitally reproduced. However, it will still be drawn by hand, just through the computer.

Line control with my pencil is a very hard thing to grasp. I am a sketcher, my lines have nice curve quality to them, but I need to work on my line quality more, even after this exercise. This has started me on the right path, but more work really needs to happen.

VISCOM1; Line Book; Final Statement

Streetviews

Streetviews is the name of my line study book.  Below is what is printed on the cover of this book:

Kansas City is full of bustling streets and busy offices, it never slows down. I have come to enjoy taking walks around the city taking time to slow down, take a breath, and escape from my everyday tasks. In doing this, I have come to find there are innumerable parts of this city that are stunningly gorgeous. Everything from the office buildings in the business district, the apartment buildings on the plaza, art pieces strewn throughout the city, sewer covers on the streets, and metal workings showing through the concrete on the sidewalks. All of these pieces share one thing in common, the lines within them. They are all made up them, all in different ways, and all have different tasks. Everything is comprised of lines and it just takes a keen eye to be able to find all of these treasures.

The beginning of this project we started with basic line studies representing balance, progression, and randomness.

From here we combined the line studies to make complex line studies. With these combined line studies we were still required to show the three different ideas of balance, progression, and randomness.

From all of these computer-generated line studies, we hand-manipulated them with photocopiers, scanners, and projectors. At this point we could put the three ideas aside and focus on creating nice curved and diagonal line studies. From these new studies would come the three original ideas again.

From this point in the process, we took all of those generated line studies and we went into the real world of Kansas City and photographed our surroundings. We were supposed to find the line studies we created in the studio out in the real world. I took hundreds of photos over a week in the plaza, crown center, crossroads, business, and river market areas. Of these photos, I was trying to find pre-existing line studies in the community of Kansas City that mimic the line studies that I created in the studio.

 Once we had our pictures we went back into the studio to create our juxtapositions. We started working with matching up line studies with photographs to create successful pairings that went logically together. We worked with mirroring the two, continuation from one into the other, and echoing of the two.

The line studies that I created at the beginning were rather simple, rather minimalistic. This made the creation of the complex line studies harder, as well as finding line studies in the real world harder to capture. In my photos I was focusing on buildings and close-ups of objects along the streets. I wanted to focus on the area of Main Street, and all of the different places and objects you can see in the different districts that are located off of Main Street. This took me everywhere from the Plaza, to the River Market.

Working with the photocopier, scanner, and projector really helped with the curved and diagonal line studies. It made me realize that the computer cannot do everything, like I once thought. It, too, is limited in what it can do. Using hand-generated tools to create these things were very much more successful. Even the hand is more successful in creating nice controlled curves than the computer sometimes.

In my book, I worked with a pattern of ABBABBAAB in that A was a building(or a bigger object) and B was a close-up shot of something located directly on the streets and sidewalks. Within that setup, I also worked with trying to match up densities of blacks, whites, and grays to make it a nice transition on the eyes from image to image and spread to spread.