3D Foundations is over, and a new class begins; Fundamentals of Art. Week one is all about Composition. To be honest, this class is one tough class, specifically the amount of homework to do! there are 6 assignments to complete in week one alone, and that's not including the final quiz and discussion topics. I'm actually wondering if I will even be able to keep up in the coming weeks (I was lucky enough to have five days off this week which allowed me to concentrate on the work). I guess time will tell.
Anyway, on to this weeks subjects. Composition. My initial task was to write a discussion article about "why modern art is bad", or if we disagreed, "why it isn't". It was an interesting discussion mainly because I learned a great deal about modern artists I had not even heard of. I think it's all too common to think of all modern art as the shock-fests and frankly, outright lunacy that gets all the attention in the "modern art scene". While I agree there is a lot of rubbish out there, there are a lot of examples of art and artists of this current generation that really buck that trend. My own discussion centered around Rackstraw Downes and his panoramic views.
We then studied and wrote a visual report with supporting photographs about the various basic principles of art. Line, Shape, Form, Value, Color, Pattern, Rhythm, Unity, Texture, Emphasis and Balance. Once we found examples in the world around us, we were tasked to photograph it and use that in our report. Not too difficult, but I had to do it while working, so needless to say there's a lot of aviation related stuff in there!
Next up was some Photoshop work. Being fairly familiar with the basics of Photoshop, this did not pose too much of an issue. We simply took five large images from the internet and extracted four small abstracts from those images, then identified the appropriate artistic principle of the abstract.
Next in line was an exercise to complete five sketches, each one illustrating a key artistic principle. I hadn't put pencil to paper in years and was quite surprised how it all came back!
Next, we took a photograph in Photoshop again, but this time we created numerous "thumbnails" of small sections, made some basic adjustments, scaling, rotations etc then built three large scale images using these tiles, again, each image to demonstrate an artistic principle.
Next up was five more sketches, in the still-life tradition. Small items from around us, arranged to show five specific composition techniques; Negating the edge of a frame (the image can easily continue beyond the frame), Centralizing the subject, Filling the frame completely to all 4 edges, Crowding the frame (to produce a highly dynamic piece), and Emphasizing the edges (making edges/frame part of the composition. The latter of these I am still trying to wrap my head around.
And finally, we had one last assignment; Re-framing existing images using either "The Rule of Thirds" or "The Golden Mean". Again, using Photoshop, I simply applied a template to existing photographs and determined the best composition assuring I followed one of the aforementioned techniques. I think the results are quite obvious!
All in all, it was one heck of a first week, and I still have a few things left to do... Hopefully I keep the momentum going!
No comments:
Post a Comment