CalArts: Funds. of Graphic Design-W1: 1.5 Techniques of Imagemaking 2

Experiment with a lot of different tools for mark making. 
Even though these images are all line based, the tool that the line is made with has a great effect on what the image looks like and how the image feels.

The quality of the line can be seen in the tool that makes the mark but also in the gesture that you’re making.

Think about how your arm is moving, and how your hand is moving as you make these lines that represent the object.

Your lines could be very loose and organic, or on the other hand your lines could be much tighter and more graphic.

You could have a line that feels a little bit more naive or a little bit more primitive.

Or perhaps you use your line as an image making strategy. This apple, for instance, is drawn with a single stroke of a ballpoint pen, the pen never ever leaving the paper.

You could also think about your images having no line quality at all, and just working with volume.

Here the image has no outline, it has no linear qualities to rely on to define its shape. Instead, it uses texture and weight.

It becomes very gestural, but even without the description of the line or without color, we can still tell it’s an apple. 

And when we start to use color with the idea of volume, you really get a sense of what the object feels like in an expressive way.

Here the designer uses volume to describe the outside of the apple, but the lack of volume actually describes the inside of the apple, the white flesh of it. 

Small details, like the pips and the stalk, let us know that it’s an apple, and maybe not some other kind of fruit.

And in this image, you can clearly see how volume works without the linear definition to contain it. Here, the color is blurring out into the background and really leaving us with just an impressionistic view of the apple.

This image is also relying on color as a primary means to express that the object is an apple.

And this can be exaggerated even more by emphasizing and overemphasizing both the scale and the saturation of the color.

So here our recognition of this object as an apple really relies on the fact that we recognize this round shape that’s red with a small leaf that’s green as being an apple and not something else. Even though we can clearly see it’s made out of other elements that have other meanings. 

So if we were to revisit denotation for a moment, we could think that, perhaps if this leaf on top of the apple was in a different shape, then perhaps we wouldn’t read it as an apple anymore. We’d read it as a tomato. So, what we are trying to get at here, is how do you make an image that gets at the essence of your object?