Design Week 3

The second project for my design class relates to shape integration and exploring figure/ground relationships, positive and negative space, integration and equivocal space. I thought this project was going to be a bit easier than the first project because she demonstrated most of the project in class and we had a step by step instruction sheet. But it turned out harder in the sense it was difficult to execute. There was actually a lot of thought that had to go into the planning because you couldn't really just "go with it" since it had to achieve certain ideas.

So the first thing I did was choose a serif letter (letters that have feet, except i ended up cutting mine off so you have to give me the benefit of the doubt that it is a serif letter - my teacher did at least) and enlarge it to 10". Then I arranged and traced the letter onto a 6"x9" black piece of paper and cut it out and place it on a 6"x9" piece of bristol paper in the same orientation as it was on the black paper to get the panel 1(left). For panel 2 (right), I took the left over black pieces from the black paper that I cut the letter out of and cemented it to another piece of bristol, ensuring each piece retained its original shape (ie didn't overlap and create a new shape). This was hard because I had to think about how this arrangement would affect panel 3. If I didn't do it right, I wouldn't be able to show the right shape relationships.

To begin panel 3 I traced panel 1 and panel 2 onto the same piece of tracing paper. Looking at the composite (the traced panels), I determined which areas I would make white, black, light grey and dark grey to determine the shape relationships: interpenetration (transparent), overlap, and division.
To create panel 3, I used black, light grey and dark grey cover stock (its like construction paper) and trimmed each piece to the composite pieces. Each piece was cut individually and pieced together like a puzzle to look like panel 1 and panel 2 essentially overlapped each other.
And this is the final result on mat board. Panel 1 demonstrates figure/ground with a black figure on white background. Panel 2 is a figure/ground reversal in which you either see white on black or black on white (I always tend to see black on white but its fairly equal here). Panel 3 is equivocal in which its fairly ambiguous which is the figure and the background. It also demonstrates the shape relationships mentioned above. Can you see them?

BTW last week's project got and A and so did this one! Yay me! I'm not trying to brag but I'm just excited because I was sure I'd be so bad at this class.