For our final project in Professor Ginger Levant’s Drawing/Imaging class, we were asked to choose two artists, research on their paintings, reflect on their drawing, and create a prototype through the grids based on these two artists drawing style and techniques.
My two artists are Max Ernst and Salvador Dali. Both of them are surrealist artists. In my opinion, surrealism artworks are sometimes hard to understand, because their are always implications behind them. Also the drawing style are sometimes peculiar and even monstrous that in order to make people imagine.
At first I created two rough prototypes based on each artist’s work. The first one is inspired by Max Ernst’s work The Fireside Angel, and the second one is inspired by Salvador Dali’s self portrait. I did the Max Ernst one’s through Continuity in Gestalt Principle and Salvador Dali’s in mainly Similarity. I lengthened the paws of the bird and tried to make them touch each grid. For the second one, I created bubbles around, and they became smaller while they got near to the center. Especially in the second one, I tried to combine with the first one, so I made the half face into a smiling bird just like in the first prototype.
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After talking with Professor Levant, she and I both liked the first one better. So I decided to continue with the first one. She suggested that I can created something in the background to make a perspective so that the bird doesn’t look so centered, since our goal is to make a prototype on the grids based on the Gestalt Principle, and the continuity in my drawing is not so strong yet. I put some thick lines in the back, and I felt it was a good direction to go because it looked more fit into the grids.
Then I put colors on it. The paint tools I used are color markers. I tried out two sets of colors. The first one is a Triad. It contains blue, red, and yellow with different saturation. The second one is an Analogous. It has reddish purple, purple, and dark blue. I kinda like the Analogous one more because I felt it pops out more.
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Professor Levant provided me a lot of ideas. She even printed out my drawing, cut it out, and made a collage on it. Below is the example that she showed me, which was also the direction I was working towards later.
Later I also cut my drawing into pieces and regrouped them. I put them together by a glue stick on another piece of paper so there’s some cracks in between. For the first Triad color one, the pieces I cut out were larger. I kept more complete organizations such as paws and faces, and added more colors and lines to make a perspective. For the second Analogous one, I cut the pieces much more smaller. Besides the face of the bird, the whole thing is really hard to recognize for this one. Also I added more colors and lines to extrude the grids.
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Since I chose the Analogous colors. I tried out more ways on this one. First I covered on top with more purple color with different saturation in order to make a dominant color in this drawing. Then I focused on grids one by one. I filled in colors that is based on the lines and sections in each grid and ignored that this line might connect to the grid beside it.
After this process, I felt that I do not have to put the drawing into pieces, because that would be too messy after I put different colors based on grids. Another thing is, because of the size of our final prototype is different so the amount of the grids are different. In our process we have 8*10 grids, but for our final we have 6*8. As the amount of grids got lesser it kinda restricted the variability of the drawing through grids. So I decided to draw my final prototype more like the the one before I cut it and added more paws to make the Continuity more stand out so it is not exactly like the first one. I decided to ignore the original shape and fill the colors out by grids. Below is the shape that I drew out for the final prototype.
This is the final prototype that I drew. I finally decided to use blue, dark blue, and purple with different saturation in my drawing, and my dominant color is blue. After the colors were filled out through the grids, I use darker blue and purple to highlight out some paws shapes and the head of the bird. As you can see, each grid has different colors from the ones near it. My purpose was to make this prototype not so clear while people first time look at it. But after a while they may find out that this is a creepy dancing bird.
In this final prototype drawing, I switched a lot of concepts and finally came up with a result that I was satisfied with. After I finished my final project, I feel I have more understandings of drawing with grids throughout the process. I have also learned a lot of elements related to design that will be of great help to me in the future.
