P2 Project Documentation:
Graceful: my favorite word out of the six. For sketches, I started out with curvy figures, trying to simulate a ballet dancer. However, after 2–3 sketches I realized that gracefulness is not limited to people. Gracefulness is a very subtle attribute that can also be applied to objects. Hence, I finished the sketches with a few “motionless” shapes.
I picked it as one of the final word pair. I transformed my favorite sketch to digital form. While creating the digital copy, I broke down some of the bigger squares to smaller squares to draw contrast. It was also very natural to me to color the center square blue since it grasps the attention of the piece. I never realized the Gestalt principle of close — openness can be applied to the figure until Kaylee pointed it out in class.
Clumsy: To portray clumsiness, I went for the literal way. I must admit that this was very difficult for me. It makes me aware that I use a lot of literal figure to convey the meaning of clumsy. As a result, I am not quite satisfied with the way I portrayed clumsy. I am certain that there is a more abstract way to describe this word. My classmates seem to be using the assumption of gravity to achieve this (i.e. portraying several blocks falling over), which is an assumption that I never made in any of the portraits.
Passive: Initially, I did not intent to create my piece for passive. I wanted to create a feeling of rigid by surrounding a block with another 3. However, as I added the 3 squares into the thumbnail, they appear to be very robotic, which irritated me. I decided to completely destroy this sense of balance, and hence giving up on rigidness. I added in more squares to create a feeling of being surrounded and isolated. Eventually, I reached to the final piece after tweaking some of the black squares so the audience knows that they are squares.
Active: This is another piece where I did not intent to create. I wanted to create an optical illusion (did not use any curvy lines but the resulting shape has a curve like part of the circle). Yet, the overlapping squares turned out to create a feeling of activeness. The different spacing between each layers of squares indicates that the squares are moving towards a certain direction. I suppose this is an accidental application of Gestalt’s principle of completeness — that our eyes tend to complete what is not delineated.
Illusion: Originally, I created a chess board since it is perfectly half black and white. Because I wanted more movements in this piece, I mismatched each row in hope that it will achieve my goal. This led to my end product. In my opinion, it failed to provide the desired figure/ground ambiguity.
