DAY 5/5 — GAUZY
The texture of today is gauzy! My friend Ali chose this texture because of her need to let the heat and light in of the day. Yesterday was an incredibly hot day and choosing to succumb to the heat was a brave, but admirable, choice. Interestingly, though today was the last day of the 5-in-5, I found today’s work come to me the easiest. I’m hoping that that’s evidence that I’ve sharpened my tool set along the way! Ali and I had a similar definition of what ‘gauzy’ means to us. Her definition discussed the transparency, sheer coverage, and ability to accentuate the heat and the light. Mine focused on its ability to dissolve into its background, its thinness, and fluffiness. To me, our definitions created a full picture of the texture.
My initial sketch created a thin, sheer, background and literally deposited shapes of heat and light to be draped over by the thin background layers. The colors I chose were pretty obvious to me too; all colors had to feel light and airy, but also feel natural.

In my first attempt, I liked the way these blocks created “curtains” of color. Though I wanted to stay away from material objects, it made sense to me that the background should be reminiscent of sheets of fabric in some way or another. The three are randomly generated in three sections of the screen to give the background a breeze-like motion (something like clothes hung up to the dry in the wind).

I liked the idea of the background looking like sheets of fabric, but in order to give it more texture I decided to create random streaks that overlaid the original three colors. Though gauzy is light and airy, its still a texture with imperfections and I wanted to make sure that I represented that.

Like in my sketch, I decided to create a particle system that represented the bursts of heat and light that leaked through the background “curtains”. I chose a bright red color and quickly realized that that color had no place in this sketch. I decided that the color needed to be more pastel, or transparent in order to feel unified with the background.

I ended up liking this a lot. The white worked really well against the background colors. The more I stared at it though, the more I realized I couldn’t make something that felt “wet”. Gauze, to me, definitely had a dryness to it. I decided to push on with the experimentation with shapes.

NOTE: The gif is sped up to stay under the size limit. In my experimentation, I tried a variety of shapes but still couldn’t find a shape that felt like dry heat to me.

I finally settled on triangles, a shape I hadn’t thought to use until this final project! Because they both pointed up and, like heat, rose from the ground, they seemed to do just the trick. This piece didn’t quite feel complete and I wanted to challenge myself to add some curved lines.
Though this piece was largely dominated by geometric shapes, I felt that the addition of the wispy curves broke up the hard geometric lines in a way that contributed to the softness of the piece. Overall, the idea of this piece came to me fairly quickly, I think in part because the definition of the texture that Ali gave me aligned so much with that of my own. Another key difference with this project compared to the others is that Ali and I spent the a chunk of our days together, and the texture was in part prompted by the heat. Our shared experience, and her ability to articulate my feelings about the texture so readily helped me feel more confident in today’s sketch.

