Shape was a really fun project and was my quickest completed activity although I expected it to take me the most time. The first project in shape was Composing Space with Tension, the materials used included white Bristol paper, black paper, magazines, an x-act knife and black ink. The objective was to find a magazine with geometric and organic shapes dominant within a page and cut out 5-7 interesting shapes from this photo. These cutouts need to have quality and variation in order to create the designs intended. Using the x-acto knife cutout the shapes from the magazine and cut out the shape on black paper thinking about engaging negative and positive space to make the art piece feel alive and with personality. This goes into 3 segments. The first being compression and the focus of this is compressed space with contrast between compressed and open space for an abstract piece with balance in mind using techniques such as overlapping, repeating, and merging shapes by planning this out with the cutouts and then tracing and filling the shapes with black ink
Positive Space Switcheroo, the focus of this is to make the positive and negative spaces ambiguous for the viewers and bring engagement with viewers to keep their eye focused on the piece. Emphasis and movement are a priority for this so that there’s not a feeling of flatness. The negative spaces need to be black and the white is the positive space. Creating a white positive space using your black shapes in ink.
Directing the Viewers Eye- This time you use the black paper cut outs and the actual magazine cutouts in order to create flow on and off the page leading the viewers eyes into different directions. This is fun because you can see the original pieces the outlines came from and also incorporate different fabrics in order to place a mood or tone. I used an rose petal for an organic shape of a horse
The next project for shape is Shadow Puppets with the objective being about a famous fairytale written to your own twists with a story board prewritten as the script with 8-12 panels and a 3-4 minute puppet show recording. Materials needed: black paper, X-acto knife, artist tape and sticks to put together the puppets. For this project you also need organic and geometric with 3-4 character puppets and at least 4 architectural elements or props. I chose to do the princess and the frog since it was my favorite Disney movie and also the visuals just seemed fun (cute frogs). This project was the most fun to me because I love stories and the overall theme here. Making these cutouts were extremely easy and I was actually quite proud of the work I did, however, for this project it is very important to rehearse before you present!!
