Drawings
Visualizing Music
Project Description:
For your final project, you will use the media of your choice to make a visual representation of a song. Your project should evoke a sense of the style, texture, and mood of the song. Your composition will represent a culmination of the various design principles covered this semester. Projects will be assessed based on their execution of the following principles: Unity & variety balance, rhythm, scale & proportion, focal point(s), color, and value.
Midterm Drawing
Project Description:
Describe differences in edges of shadows, showing a range between hard and soft shadows. Describe changes in value (lights and darks). Create a unified composition, using a viewfinder to determine the composition initially. Depict accurate proportions using sight measuring. Demonstrate a variety of mark-making approaches in order to describe differences in texture and surface.
Multiple View Composition
Project Description:
In this project, you will produce a coherent composition that is dynamic, informative, aesthetically pleasing, and implies space/depth using multiple views within a single picture plane.
Steps:
1. Select a fairly complex but commonly recognizable object to serve as a subject. Do not choose a symmetrical
object such as a water bottle, mug, or sunglasses. The object must have some dimension to it (a house key, for instance, will not work).
2. Create 4 initial drawings of your subject:
a. Plan: top and/or bottom view
b. Elevation: Side view
c. Detail: focus on an interesting aspect of your subject
d. Perspective: a view from an angle. Explore different perspective drawings. You should try many different perspective drawings until you find the most interesting angle.
3. Create four compositions that integrate each drawing.
These initial compositions should be sketches in your sketchbook. Consider overlapping and cropping, and experiment with principles of negative and positive space, scale, contrast, symmetry, balance, and pattern. Although your object need not be rendered perfectly, each composition should offer a novel combination of at least two devices to show depth and space.
4. Refine one of your compositions and draw it in the media of your choice on 8 x 11” (or larger) white drawing paper.
Self-Portrait Symbolism
Project Description:
The Final Project is a Self-Portrait. The self-portrait must signify you either through symbol or icon, according to how each is defined within the field of semiotics. Consider your life and identity, and how each is already represented through images, objects, etc. Can these references be used as inspiration for a drawing that signifies your identity? Your drawing may be from observation, but this is not required.
Abstraction, Texture, and Collage
Project Description:
Create an abstract collage with positive space, negative space, and a wide variety of textures. Utilize the principles of unity to organize variety. Use a grid to create an observational drawing of a flat surface. Demonstrate a wide variety of mark-making to create illusions of texture using drawing pencils. Demonstrate a wide variety of value changes through layering various densities of drawn marks. Create a drawn, abstract composition which is unified through the use of repetition, proximity, or continuity.
Rhythm
Project Description:
Create a unified and balanced composition to evoke a mood, theme, or emotion through use of formal elements (variation of line quality, rhythm, balance/symmetry, scale & proportion) and use source imagery from nature to create a unique composition.
Marking Time, Indexing Yourself
Project Description:
You will create a project that is indexical of you in some way, whether through image, mark-making, materials used, or any combination of these. Your chosen material, mark-making, and/or the image you create will be indexical of you and/or your daily life in some way. Consider the objects and materials that surround you on a daily basis. Consider the actions and physical moves you make on a daily basis.
Value Self-Portrait
Project Description:
1. Begin with a self-portrait. The printed photo should be relatively close-up and should not have distracting features like props, complex backgrounds, patterns, etc.
2. Make a black and white print-out or copy of your image. Adjust lightness and darkness as needed to produce a wide range of values.
3. Draw a 1⁄2” square grid on the section of the image you wish to reproduce. Consider how much you are zooming in, cropping, etc. to create a visually interesting composition. The dimensions should be at least 8” and up to 12”.
4. Label one side of the grid “a-x,” the other “1-24”, depending on the dimensions of your image.
5. With drawing paper and a pencil, lightly draw a grid of 1/2” squares on a piece of white drawing paper. The dimensions should be the same as your initial image.
6. Label one side of the grid “a-x,” the other “1-24” (depending on the dimensions of your image).
7. Estimate the average value of each square in your image and fill the corresponding squares with solid tones. You will not be drawing in lines or details. Instead, you will be coloring each box of your paper with the average value of corresponding squares in your image. You may use markers or pencils on white paper.
8. Crop your drawing and mount it to a piece of black mounting board.