Figure-Ground Assignment

For my figure-ground exploration, I made a newspaper collage where the figure is easily distinguishable from the background. I wanted to construct a solid and simple ground that wouldn’t overwhelm the figure, so I just cut out blocks of straight text, lined them up, and glued them down. For the figure, I used the shape of a Platonic solid, the icosahedron. I chose a point from where the figurative light would hit the object from, and I decided on how dark each piece should be. The “shadows” on the figure makes the figure stand out from the background. I then proceeded to scour through newspapers for different ranges of gray and cut out the pieces I needed. I constructed the icosahedron from darkest to lightest pieces, switching out pieces along the way if they needed to be darker or lighter. When I finished, I scanned the collage into Adobe Illustrator.

On Adobe Illustrator, I traced out all of the shapes I could find in the collage. Due to my simple geometric shape, I added more shapes so that I’d have more of a variety.

I then chose my most interesting shapes and filled them in with black.

Then, I copied the pieces one to new artboards and started shaping them in each piece. It was difficult switching to do each piece because you have to completely switch mindsets and change up how you use each puzzle piece in the different figure-ground collages.