#studio1

FORWARDING FROM FOUNDATION OPERATION FABRICATION 

FABRICATION is the process of restoration from raw material for future preservation

Today was hand in day. We had to bring all the elements of our project together. I went off first thing to print the poster. Then we all had to wait for the 3D Labs to be open to get the box, and resin discs. Sam, Angelica, and Liam went over to get everything. After about an hour they hadn’t returned so I went over myself to check if everything was going okay. Sam and Angelica told me that something had gone wrong with the resin’s curing process and they had to have each disc separately vacuum sealed for health and safety. Also, that the box wouldn’t open and close properly anymore so Liam had gone to see if he could sand it down a little. I went to go check on Liam, he was having difficulty with trying to sand the box without ruining the stain we had all worked so hard on. After having a short chat with the Technicians, they figured out a way that would fix our problem as best as possible, hopefully within our time constraints. They said that they thought we shouldn’t have actually stained the box in the first place, that the problem was how the wood had swollen with the stain, that natural wood looks the nicest, and our box had still looked pretty good even before we stained it. So, we had to sand away a lot of the stain, just to get the box to even work kind of like it used to. We also decided to give the box an old, distressed kind of look as an aesthetic, instead of freaking out to much about the stain.

Week 13 Food Metamorphosis Project Reflection

For my studio led by Alex, we were given the theme, food metamorphosis. For this task, we are required to explore the transformation of food within a series of at least 12 designed and image based cards. The project had a really open brief which I liked. 

The reading references given in the brief were all about surrealism, thus that was my starting point. From surrealism, I sort of linked it to Alice in the Wonderland which were influential to some Surrealist like Salvador Dali. Alot of elements in the story are also categorized under surrealism. These includes strange creatures (Mad Hatter, Cheshire Cat, etc), illogical sequences and comments. 

From there, I immediately linked Alice’s body transformation after consuming food and drinks to the studio topic, Food metamorphosis. On thing led to another and I finally settled on alcohol effects on our mind.

The process of creating the cards was then the struggle for me. Coming from an Architectural course, I never had to illustrate an entire artwork based Photoshop and Illustrator. Sketching out the cards was the easiest part. However, I had to watch countless youtube tutorials and experiment with the tools just to come up with the most efficient way to digitize the sketches. It was a struggle, but I eventually got there. 

However, I did take too long to do the first half of the cards. Two weeks before submission day, I still had 5 more cards(brain cards) to do. I experimented with different ways I can portray the cards but it didn’t turn out as I expected. The 2D drawings of the brain just made the entire series too flat. This further took more time. The light bulb moment was when I was reading through my old Tumblr posts. My week 4 pretty sweet post talked about Dinara Kasko and how she applied her architectural design skills into pastry making. This is when I decided to use an Architectural software to model out the brain, giving more dimension to the cards. This also took lesser time for me to do. From there, it was just adding text to the cards, which was also pretty simple to do. 

All in all, the entire process, even thou tedious, was a huge learning journey for me. I would like to think that my learning curve has gone up several levels. I learned how to properly digitize line art on illustrator, how to colour in my work while adding dimension. I am pretty satisfied with the final outcome. 

I guess next in line for me would to be come up with my art style and strengthen it. This would shorten the research process a lot. I would definitely keep working on that during the holidays.