Project Type: Colour

  • Lost in Blue

    Lost in Blue

    For this project I decided to explore one of Solnit’s key themes in ‘A Field Guide to Getting Lost: Blue. She uses the title ‘Blue of Distance’ for alternate chapters. In the first chapter she links this with a discussion of cyanotype visions of the world. The cover of my paperback copy has an atmospheric abstract watery watercolour landscape on the cover – much like my view over St Ives Bay where we were staying.

    My original inspiration for the project was the following text that I found calming and inspiring as I gazed out of our camper van window at the sea and sky of St Ives Bay.

    Blue of Distance and Depth: The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that gets lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colourless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the colour blue. ( Solnit A Field Guide to Getting Lost p29)

    Use an image and a piece of text to create maximum information or detail. Next, strip back the design to maintain the same meaning or effect but with minimum visual content. Find a point between these two positions where there’s just enough information or detail.

    Preparation

    My working process was somewhat different from the previous project in that I started with existing physical images – cyanotypes – that were random and experimental rather than explicitly designed for this purpose. I then manipulated the images using Procreate on my iPad to fit three different extracts from Solnit’s text.

    In my ‘Lost on the Way to Zennor’ sketchbook I had made a page of ‘Blue’ quotations from Solnit, matched with a collage of some of my ink and gouache doodles.

    I had become increasingly interested in the cyanotype process as another photography-based printmaking process that I could do at home. I had booked my self onto a course with Karina Savage at Curwen Print Study Centre in Linton. These first cyanotype images were very experimental in exploring different textures – glass hangings, small sherry glasses, feathers, latex gloves, clingfilm, prisms, bubblewrap, netting, grasses and jewellery with different angles of exposure. Some of the images were produced on top of solution painted on with a brush so had brushmarks, other images were on pre-prepared paper and these produced different blue tones. But I really liked some of the textures and effects. I decided it would be interesting to use these rather arbitrary images and see where they led.

    Theme 1: Blue light lost

    I used Procreate on my iPad for many of my most successful images in Illustration 2. It is a very flexible software that can produce many image variants quickly through blend modes, masks etc that can produce very evocative high resolution images from many different types of source image. There have been a lot of recent updates eg addition of text, more blur and selection functions and a sophisticated liquify mode. Further developing these skills is important in diversifying my digital work away from my pc and managing my RSI.

    • I selected the cyanotype that I considered the most evocative of ‘beautiful blue light’ as my base image, edited it slightly to give fewer glass circles and put the full text in the gap so that it was legible.
    • I then cropped the image to square in different ways and overlaid a much shorter version of ‘Blue is the light that gets lost’. Of these I like the darker more dramatic image with its glistening light and the text that gets lost.
    • The fourth version was then really minimal with just the word blue, leaving the light to speak for itself.
    • The final image has excerpts for the text in Optima typeface for elegance and to give a bit more information. I tried several darker versions to be more like the version 3 and need to work on this more to make the blues more varied and the text more shimmery as it is a bit bland.

    Theme 2 The fable of the blue jar: innocence and freedom

    For the second theme I used a different crop of the same cyanotype and a different text:

    • The first maximum image is the same image as Blue Light Lost but flipped horizontally and making a masked hole for the longer text to make it legible.
    • For the second maximum image I cut and flipped the running figure to make her more obviously a woman running towards the pyramid palace. I like the very stylised figure produced by accident from the splayed ends of the jewellery.
    • In the third Minimum image I further cropped the image and reduced the text to make it a more enigmatic commentary on whether the dazzling beauty of the pyramid was ‘innocent’ and whether the figure running after the glitz is in fact free.
    • For the ‘just right’ image I reduced the text from the original tale to something shorter and more poignant. I added a rather robotic blue vase for her heart. But I think this is quite effective as an evocative fairy tale image.

    Not the right blue’ ideas of unreachability and yearning from a story by Isak Dinesen about the daughter of a shipwrecked merchant obsessed with blue chinaware. “although she bought many hundred blue jars and bowls, she would always after a time put them aside and say: ‘Alas, alas, it is not the right blue.’ When her father suggested maybe the blue she was looking for did not exist she said ‘O God, Papa, how can you speak so wickedly? Surely there must be some of it left from when all the world was blue.’ After decades she finally found an old blue jar from the Chinese emperor’s summer palace. When she saw it she said that now she could die, and when she died, her heart would be cut out and put in the blue jar. ‘And everything will be as it was then. All shall be blue around me, and in the midst of the blue world my heart will be innocent and free, and will beat gently…’ ( Solnit A Field Guide to Getting Lost pp 125-126)

    Theme 3 Melancholy Blue

    Theme 3 ‘Melancholy Blue’ started with the same text as theme 1 ‘Blue that gets lost’ but with the rather intriguing latex glove dog shape image. Imagining the dog is called blue. In the inverted image experiment I like the Prussian Blue lines against the pale blue. This suggested whistful melancholy.

    So I returned to my Solnit quotes and started to work with different text:

    Cyanotypes (Prussian blue) and melancholy: This world was realised in the cyanotypes, or blue photographs of the nineteenth century – ‘cyan’ means blue, though I always thought the term referred to the cyanide with which the prints were made. Cyanotypes were cheap and easy to make, and so some amateurs chose to work in cyanotype altogether, some professional photographers used the medium to produce preliminary prints, treated so they would fade and vanish in a few weeks’ time: these vanishing prints were made as samples from which to order permanent images in other tones. In cyanotypes you arrive in this world where darkness and light are blue and white, where bridges and people and apples are blue as lakes, as though everything were seen through the melancholy atmosphere that here is cyanide. ( Solnit A Field Guide to Getting Lost p34)

    • The first maximum version takes the full dog cyanotype and full text, with a transparent background for legibility.
    • In the second maximum version I cropped the image square to create a more claustrophobic feel. I shortened the text to focus on the idea of depression and threat of suicide. I wanted to reduce the contrast between the blue and very bright white. But the black and cream do not work. The dog shape also becomes less clear.
    • In the minimum version I keep the cropped claustrophobic image and reduced contrast but with just the word melancholy, letting the image speak for itself. I put a further overlay to reduce the contrast between the white and blue and make the blue a darker melancholic Prussian blue.
    • The final version then draws on the inverted image above. I wanted a more tangled melanchoilc mess where the word itself was more expressive. I overlaid a crop of the image with a clipping mask. I like this image

    Earlier Photoshop versions: Blue is the LIght that gets Lost

    These are my original cynatoptype photographic experiments in Photoshop/DXo FX before I had learned the cyanotype process. The first using Silver FX antique cyanotype effect looks rather like a Bible reading – reminiscent of some of the posters outside the many churches in St Ives. The second one is more dramatic. I like the bold verticals like bars of a jail enclosing/excluding the viewer with depressive blue. Somewhat reminiscent of Ed Ruscha. I need to become more proficient in Photoshop to make them look more interesting.

    Further possibility

    Yves Klein Leap blue ( intense Ultramarine) globe and colour of the void, space and death. In 1957 Yves Klein painted a globe with his deep electric blue (intense Ultramarine), and with this gesture it became a world without divisions between countries, between land and water, as though the earth itself had become sky, as though looking down was looking up…Painting the world blue made it all terra incognita, indivisible and unconquerable, a ferocious act of mysticism’…1960 Leap Into the Void

    ( Solnit A Field Guide to Getting Lost pp ??)

  • Life is Orange

    Life is Orange

    ‘l love every minute of my life… I squeeze it like an orange and eat the peel, because I don’t want to miss a thing.’ Huguette Caland

    I chose ‘Orange’ because I wanted to start this series of projects with something bright and optimistic. Initially I had worked with ‘Lost in Blue’ from my first visit to St Ives in March – a time when the weather was fairly consistently cold and rainy and the atmosphere very tense with uncertainty of a No Deal Brexit. My work at this time was pretty depressing.

    But then in the second visit in July there was an exhibition by Huguette Caland at Tate St Ives that really inspired me with her bold abstract shapes and bright colours – though I also like her thin pen and ink drawings. I enjoyed her playful innovative approach to sexuality and enjoyment in shocking what was at the time a male-dominated art establishment. And the quote below seemed to sum up the more lively and optimistic side of my somewhat bipolar psyche.

    Developing the Concept

    This project was the first of three warm up exercises:

    TASK Using an image, text, a flat block of colour and a limited colour palette, create as many text and image combinations as possible.

    I decided to take quite some time over because it was a useful framework within which to explore Project 1.3 Creative Design Toolkit in much more depth and also significantly develop my practical skills and experience with the many stylistic possibilities of Adobe Illustrator.

    I started with a review of the work of Huguette Caland to understand a bit more about her work. From this I selected a palette of orange, red, warm yellow contrasting with turquoise, dark brown and black. I also did an Internet search on ‘Orange’ to look at the different cultural interpretations and uses in graphic design. I experimented with ideas and acrylic colours on large A2 sheets in my Cornwall sketchbook to loosen up before working digitally.

    Version 1 Define It

    My first attempts were rather standard graphic design that interpreted the task in a rather uninteresting way – though I did experiment with distortion of the text, different text effects and image trace in Illustrator. This looks like an advert for oranges and the meaning of the text is lost – particularly in the final version where Love and Eat are the same size and the eye seems to go straight through to the orange. The first line of the much plainer text in version 3, without any attempt at illustrative manipulation, lets the meaning through much more clearly, without competition from ‘eat’. The first line containing the real essence of the meaning of the rest of the text.

    Version 2 Make It Bold

    In ‘Make It Bold’ in order to give prominence to the text, I swapped the solid colour block to make that a large orange circle, initially with a grain texture, and reduced the image to a very small logo by Hugette Caland’s name. My initial attempts were uninspired – looking like cork mats and the text did not stand out in red, but using the other colours with that design looked strange. So I decided to go back to my sketchbook and play a bit more – doing a large orange/red/yellow acrylic painting with sponge and fingers like Caland’s ‘Red Sun’.

    Going back to Illustrator I removed the texture from the circle, and put a bold ‘I’ in the middle as the ‘backbone’ of the meaning – the woman in charge of her life and reactions to it. The diagonal strokes into the centre were discovered when by accident I used a very wide stroke on a dotted art brush when I was experimenting with different brush settings. I used the bold and showy Broadway font with some distortion and kerning to vary the text. The logo I put on its side in black – Caland was Lebanese – and this attracts attention to her name. I am quite pleased with what I managed to achieve here in Illustrator. Though if I was not tied by the task in brief and my aims to work in Adobe Illustrator, I think this would have been a very interesting starting point for a much more dynamic joyful treatment in paint – using also the lipstick and chocolate for the text that I experiment with below.

    Version 3 Let’s look at the real thing

    Let’s look at the real thing raises the question of what is meant by ‘real thing’? Just the image, or the meaning of the text. In the first image the eye is attracted by the big orange, but then does go to try and make out the meaning of the turquoise text – more in this simple image than in the more manipulated ‘Define It’ version. I also like the simplicity of the version with the large rather anonymous text.

    Version 4 Introduce Time Motion Sound

    Version 4 Introduce Time Motion Sound was a bit of a discovery – aiming to draw typographic inspiration from Dave Carson. Unlike Photoshop, Illustrator has no motion blur and no matter how I experimented with the other blurs and feathering, it was difficult to simulate motion.

    But when I was experimenting with clipping masks I discovered that the pixelation of the background image introduced motion. I then exaggerated this through changing the font to Acumin Pro condensed black italic -thick enough and slanted enough to show the image through. I then set the type to narrow tracking and leading and resized the text block to the full width of the frame and horizontally centred. This produces a dynamic triangular bird-shaped block of text. I contrasted Magneto Bold for Caland’s name to preserve the sense of ‘magnetic’ motion.

    Version 5 What is the Key Moment

    This variation focuses in on the verbs – with the final eating as the main moment. In the final version I kept the other text consistent as Myriad Pro, just emphasising Love and Squeeze through colour, size and tracking. The colour block was transformed as the orange drips from the squeeze. To emphasise the main moment: EAT, I chose a ‘fat’ font – Franklin Gothic Heavy. I needed to make the letterforms more symmetrical as a ‘fat block. I set the tops of the E and T to the same width, and altered the kerning to make the bottoms touch and adjusted using the character panel and touch type tool. The orange logo vertically centred on the orange drips to make the bottom corner point. ‘the peel’ was aligned with the diagonal of the A to emphasise it and set in a justified text box in line with the orange. The kerning was then altered by eye to make it roughly consistent. Huguette Caland was put in a softer brown colour to differentiate from the harder black text.

    But although the emphasis on EAT makes sense in terms of the visual dynamics, maybe I need to rethink the semantic change of emphasis from Loving Life to Eating Peel and do a new design focusing on Love.

    6 Create a Variation

    Inspired by Tomato, Verson 6 variation originated with 5 the Key Moment. But experimented with variable font Acumin and black/white contrast with coloured outlines to see what that would look like. The next version experimented with manipulating the type.

    7 Connect Play, fantasies and daydreams

    In version 7 I decided to go back to playing with textures and ways of using physical media to create letterforms. I had very much enjoyed doing this in Assignment 5 A to Z from Armageddon in Book Design 1. In my A2 sketchbook I experimented with lipstick (love), chocolate orange foil and chocolate orange segments as a brush.

    Taking these into Illustrator, I then converted these into brushes and fills.

    These still need quite a bit more work eg experimenting more with types of path for the lipstick text, incorporating the foil as fills to the orange text (kept getting an error message to clipping mask because the text is warped), and making the straight text on the chocolate image drippy. I would also like to experiment with a style more like that of Sarah Fanelli’s ‘Onion’s Great Escape’ using these same physical experiments. But this was fun and a way of working I enjoy.

    8 Combine seemingly arbitrary content

    This variation was a lot of fun to do, but raised many questions about what might be meant by ‘arbitrary’.

    I maintained certain rules like the limited colour palette where it was possible to experiment with many random variations, only altering colours through different blend modes. The background mosaic grain I selected because it suggests snake skin – not oranges. In the case of fonts there were too many, so I selected ones that might in some way suggest the opposite of the meaning of the text and laid things out to also suggest something different e.g love is Chiller far apart. Squeeze was more arbitrary in that I selected a contradictory font and then set the tracking to high as opposite of squeeze. But had not altered the text box width and so it came out in a tangled lump that I quite like. I adjusted colours and effects through blend modes to preserve a reasonable label of contrast and legibility. I did four versions just changing the background and adjusting the colours. The black version is the most ‘arbitrary’ in the sense of getting furthest away from meaning of the text. I also like the art nouveau feel of the turquoise version, though it would need more purposeful work to achieve real impact.

    Assessment, learning and further Versions

    I found this exercise enjoyable and useful – the apparently random order and near repetition of some of the versions eg bold/obvious, define/real thing, time/key moment etc and alternations between them in the list order made me think much more deeply about ways of doing things differently. Inclusion of versions like ‘arbitrary’ gave me license to really do something different that I would not have tried if I was just left on my own to think of variations.

    As I was doing a lot of work on each version in order to learn Illustrator skills, I was quite tired and getting a bit stale by Version 8. I will return to this project again in Assignment 5 when I have improved my Illustrator skills in the Visual Research module and had a complete break to come back again fresh.

  • A to Z from Armageddon

    A to Z from Armageddon

    This book is an exploration of creative processes in trying to make sense of random rules.

    The letters of the alphabet were taken as the basis for brainstorming apparently random associations between different shapes, materials, colours, meaning and narratives beginning with that letter. This provided a way of opening up possibilities beyond established rules of harmony and exploring different and new ways of combining media, colours and shapes.

    The book is a playful exploration of different associations of letterforms (style and typographic variants) and the words they may begin (colour, media, objects and moods) as a design challenge to see how apparently random elements can be combined to create harmonies and/or tensions.

    I am interested in looking at:

    • associations attached to specific letters, partly but not only through the words they begin, but also their history and evolution from earlier alphabets and their general appearance eg certain letters are generally curved, some have diagonal lines etc
    • how the abstract anatomy of a letterform can convey mood and meaning and how this can be radically altered – shape and positioning of serifs and swashes, stroke contrast, angles and position of lines, forms of curves etc. This includes not only looking at existing typefaces, but also drawing my own letterforms to enhance the meaning of words beginning with the letter.
    • can letterforms morph into each other – distinguishes specific letters from each other, what do intermediate forms look like – is this an interesting area of exploration?
    • effects of materials, papers and use of different drawing tools beginning with the letter eg Q for quill, G for glue/graphite etc can be creatively used and combined to enhance the mood of letters with specific meanings.
    • how colours beginning with those letters can be used to enhance the mood eg B with blue, brown and/or black.
    • how all the above can be combined with positioning and layout to create a playful narrative.

    Letter A  

    Aluminium foil

    Letter B ideas

    Blobs

    Letter D 

    Drypoint

    Letter F 

    Letter G 

    Letter H ideas

    Letter I 

    Isometric Paper

    Letter J 

    Jelly Jam Jar

    Letter K

    Letter L

    Letter M 

    Metallic paper, Matches, Masking Tape

    Letter N 

    Letter O

    OHP Transparency, oil pastel

    Letter P

    Letter Q

    Letter R

    Letter S

    Letter T

    Tissue Paper

    Letter U 

    Mockup for U

    Letter V  

    Letter W 

    Woodcut

    Letter X 

    Letter Y 

    Letter Z 

    Zentangle

    Creative Reflections

    My aim for the book at that point was to:  explore expressive letterforms and the ways letter shapes can be playfully manipulated and combined with colour and layout dynamics to form narratives. I had thought of this possibly as a children’s book for age around 8-10 when children can read well enough not to be confused by alternative letterforms, and beginning to be much more interested in new vocabulary and ‘bending rules’.

    However my ideas for the book expanded to further exploration of materials, colour and creative image creation as I progressed through Assignment 4. I became very interested in paper, and the ways that different scanning strategies can bring out different aspects of apparently very uninteresting materials like tissue paper (See post on Tissue Paper). I had also begun to look at woodcut, deepened my skills in Photoshop and Illustrator. This built on earlier work on colour and printmaking in earlier OCA courses.

    Other research and links

    History of the Alphabet

    Runic alphabets

    Islamic calligraphy

    Concrete poetry

    Typographic Art

    There have been many aspects of the course that I want to explore further in future:

    • visual dynamics of design
    • calligraphy and expressive type and visual dynamics of letterforms – following on from my work in Assignments 3 and 4
    • using different papers and materials for printing and then seeing how to enhance the effects through further digital manipulation in Photoshop – drawing also on work for OCA Printmaking 1 and Illustration 2.
    • commercial self-publishing options and process, including further work on layout and narrative.

    As a way of linking these elements, I decided on a book playing with the visual dynamics of letterforms  exploring different associations of the letterforms themselves (style and typographic variants) and the words they may begin (colour, media, objects and moods) as a design challenge to see how apparently random elements can be combined to create harmonies and/or tensions.

    I then started to plan production of the book in the context of both the self-publishing workflow and the inherent unpredictability of the (my) creative process – and the potential conflicts between linear planning and the need for openness to new ideas and directions as work proceeds.

    Project 5.2 : Planning your workflow

    In the end the product became two books – both still works in progress:

    • a draft book for children using my initial simple ideas and sketches, as a colourful book focusing just on letterforms. These still need further refinement and simplification, then testing with children.
    • a draft book for adults and teenagers where images and ideas are more (too?) complex but where I had much more scope to explore different media, relationship between words and images. As it stands I very much enjoyed experimenting and developing all the images and researching the histories of the different letters. But it does not yet hang together as a book – I need to think more about how the images relate together as a sequence with either greater diversity or greater similarity in styles.

    Part of the issue was lack of time – although in the real world there are tight deadlines, and I could have been much tighter in focus at the planning stage, my purpose in this assignment was learning and exploration. Potentially there is a series of different books here, each with a different focus – for example more formal patterns, fantasy and narrative, flat design, alphabet history and so on. I now need a follow-on process of reassess and refinement – and testing with different audiences.

    So the book has become much more of an exploration of the (my) creative process – interlinkages between visual expression, materials and language, the relationship between creativity and constraints in leading to new directions and inspiration. Though this exploration will be more demonstrated through its outcome in the images than discussed in the book itself. It is now much more aimed at teenagers and adults.

    Many ideas and possibilities emerged in the process before then being simplified and refined around one dominant idea.
    For more details of the process and to contribute your own ideas see: https://www.design.zemniimages.info.