Final Photo; Vladmir Nabokov

Here's the evolution of project 2 for Image class.

I chose the Russian author Vladmir Nabokov Known for such novels like Lolita and Speak, Memory, he's pretty well known for his stunning and controversial writings. He was not only an author though. He was a chess player and an entomologist, talented in anything he took an interest in.

So here's the first attempt. It has a lot of compositional problems and overall is pretty boring. I decided to keep messing with the elements of the photo, and add some more objects to help further develop the personality of Mr. Nabokov.



This is the second attempt. The composition is way too centered, but the slanted book is a bit more visually interesting then just having them stacked. I added flags to show his diversity, since he was a multilingual and also since each one represents a place he lived in at some point in his life. They're a little too cliche though.




These two are my final. The first one is the one that I sent to the plotter, and turned in for critique. The indexes for Nabokov are his books, the checkers, and butterflies, for the reasons I explained at the top. The symbols are the map and the owl. The map, is of course, representing his international life, and the owl is a representation of his wisdom.

As for the second image, I was so horrified by my stupid spelling error that I tried my hand at a little photoshop-editing to see what it would look like if I weren't such an absent-minded idiot.

Taxonomy

Final taxonomy! I made a little sleeve for it, and hopefully it will hold up. In the end, I didn't make any changes to the book other than making its title sleeve. If I were to re-do anything, I would reprint all of the pages, but I'm a little skeptical to pour more time and money into the konica when I have a sneaking suspicion that one of the reasons my images got more and more blue as I printed was because of the black ink levels. The images were not all so terrible that I needed to redo the three books, anyway.


Here are some examples of the pages inside. With the perfect binding method, I was able to place images across the spread, which is something I would not have been able to do if I had continued with the stab-binding.


I got a little silly with these pictures, but I'm pretty proud of my sleeve, so I wanted to show it off a bit! :)

Haiku : Project Evolution

Here is the linear evolution and the final artifact for the haiku project! Hopefully the transition from sketches to mark making, then from the marks to the final animation is pretty clear. And this time the animation exported with *almost* no snags! :)

Crossing it alone
in cold moonlight...the brittle bridge
echoes my footsteps

Final Haiku from Kelsey Anderson on Vimeo.

Music credits: "The Windmill's Tale of the Music Box Floats Through the Air. Riding the Windmill" by Unwed Sailor

Final Book

Oppositional pairs:

Here's my final book for the oppositional pairs. I feel like it turned out pretty well; printing on the Konica really helped with the quality of the images. I chose the pairs Stability-Instability, Contrast-Minimal Detection, Foreground-Background, and Depth-Transparency.


Putting the book together was a challenge, but it turned out pretty well in my opinion.

Final Statement - Project 2

a Tourist's Guide to Kansas City's Smaller Attractions

Like any city, Kansas City is full of tourist-oriented things to see and do. In this book, none of those things matter. These pages take a closer look at parts of Kansas City that often go unnoticed, despite their beauty. Shadows, cracks on the ground and weathered wood matched with line studies combine to make this book your own personal guide to the tiny lines of Kansas City. So stop looking where the signs and pamphlets tell you to, and explore your environment with a keen eye to find the linear details of everyday life with this line reference book in hand.

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So, the main focus of my book was on the smaller details of Kansas city, as opposed to a more architectural approach. Buildings are designed with their appearance and structure in mind, while these photographs contain objects that are less planned than that. These are images are unique to Kansas City but could also be universalized and the idea could be applied to any location.

Formally speaking, I chose to arrange my pairs so that they alternated from line study->image to image->line study. I also tried to arrange them in an order that created a sense of flow or movement between the pages, like one long continuous line throughout the whole book. So each half of a photograph is intended to complete the path or pattern into it's counterpart, and also interact with the pair it's touching.



For example, in this pairing I used one of my combined diagonal line studies and continued the pattern into the adjacent photograph. It feels sort of silly to explain something that seems pretty straight forward. Pretty much, I sorted through both my photographs and line studies, looking for similarities in the line structure, rhythm or direction. I personally had the most fun with the curved lines even though I ended up not having very many in my book. Cropping and framing isolated areas of the lines allowed for me to simplify their composition and match them with photographs more easily.


At first it was difficult to find pairs that created a conversation between each other, and I was just trying to match edges up between the two images. This might have worked just for the sake of piecing two things together, but all of those compositions were visually stagnate-they needed more than just to line up. But once I got the hang of it, creating dynamic comparisons through juxtaposition was something that became a really interesting challenge. Each half of a duo added information to the other half, so that 1+1 really added up to more than just 2! :)

The construction of the actual book was a lot more challenging that I expected it to be. Maybe I overestimated my ability to cut straight lines or measure accurately. But just like when selecting the images for the pages, the key to a good finised product was to created an excess at first, and then select only the best (square cut-outs, in this case) for the final artifact.

Drawing System

I'm just finishing up the book for Color Drawing Form, and it's full of nice finished delineations. For each page, I took some time to clean up the errors that I had made in the old versions. I especially focused on the plan and elevation obliques, to clear up some problems like layering and line weight.


I redid the environmental designs, adding some more text to make it balanced, and changing some of the line weights. I almost paid more attention to the layers, making sure that the letters were behind things on the building like pipes and windows.

Final Statement

a blue medley

It's pretty cool to see how this project began as tiny thumbnails and black canson paper circles, and has ended as a ring-bound, hand-made book. It represents all of the design elements that have been learned over the past several weeks, and holds the hours of hard work in it's little 6x9 pages.



Compositionally, there are many elements that hold this book together. I made an extended effort to use similar colours on each page, but made sure that they were varied enough to keep it from being too repetitive and boring. Finding images was an fun task too, and I have become very familiar with the staff at Half-Price Books, since I was there so often. I hope they don't think I'm weird for coming back to buy more ocean books every day. The orientation of the dots on the page was something that I had a LOT of fun with, and with each page it got easier and easier to come up with fun arrangements of images--tiny details like the directions that fish are facing, and the way that coral makes implied lines across the page.




The text/image overlays turned out pretty well, and it was interesting to see how each page looked when put together. While working with the type, I tried really hard to think of each composition independently from the dot composition it was destined to be paired with. This made the construction of the book even more exciting, as I got to see those "magic accidents" happen as the two halves worked well together.

I found myself looking through the lectures that Jamie had left on her blog a lot. Even looking through the design element pages helped me on both my type and dot compositions. I tried to pay extra attention to the elements as I continued the iterations in both classes, and work hark to make images that were both clear in their meaning and visually engaging. I've come a long way from the first set of black dots (comparing these compositions to the dots in my first viscom blog post, it's embarrassing how bad those are).




There are definitely things that could be improved about this book. That's not to say that I'm not proud of it though. I'm not very exact with measurements, and it's something that I need to continue to work on. Either that, or I need to get better at hiding my mistakes. I also wish that I had found some more imagery with similar colours to help tighten up the pages as a cohesive group. Looking through it now, I'm not too sure I'm ready to be any more critical of it yet. I just finished it today, and I'm still happy with it. I'll need to wait until after the critique and edit this.