Figure Ground Relationships

We were asked to make a collage using only black on white text from a newspaper or magazine and to keep the figure-ground relationship in mind while doing so. I chose to make the upper chest, collar bones, hair and the side of a face of a woman. In order for the figure to stand out from the background I contrasted the proximity and size of the text as well as the direction. The ground has large sized horizontal text while the figure has vertical, diagonal and curvy cuts outs of text.

Next, after scanning our final collage we used Adobe Illustrator CC to trace out shapes that we further wished to   to work with. We were only allowed to play with the direction of the shapes and not allowed to change the scale/size of them. This gave me the feeling of playing with puzzle pieces. Rearranging the shapes into a completely different composition was extremely challenging.

For the first part of the assignment, black shapes formed my figure while white remained to be the background. I made a bonfire with hair from my collage as well as wooden logs to keep it upright.

For the second part, white formed my figure and the black in turn worked as the background. I placed the curvy lines in such a way that the white between them portrayed a ghost’s face as well as it’s features.

For the last part, my work had a contrast of black on white and white on black thus making it an ambiguous or confusing piece. I tried to show hut-like structure with the black roof and bars however the waves of the swimming pool came through between the black wavy lines in the white background.