Assignment 4: Exercise 4: Types of Shape

 I’m writing this for the second time because, when I published the post on my Critical Review, the first version of this entirely disappeared!

For this exercise the theme is shape. We’re asked to work with a list of 20 synonyms for ‘shape’ and create a few sketches for each word. This made me happy because the thesaurus is one of my favourite research tools. I can get lost in there for ages, looking up synonyms, then following up synonyms of synonyms. It gives me a fuller sense of the key words that I’m trying to communicate visually. I also like the antonyms because it’s good to know what something is not. Sometimes looking at the words that mean the opposite of my key words can throw in things I need to be aware to avoid, or sometimes, things that I want to incorporate as a sort of shadow side of a concept.

However, my spirits were lowered when I typed all the words into a note on my phone and then started adding things to draw based on each word. There were 20 words so I shouldn’t have been surprised really that I ended up with 63 things to sketch!

This was a bit daunting, but in my new approach to this course, I decided that I needed somehow to get from daunting to joyful. The solution I came up with was to make a book. On the face of it, this could seem like I was making extra work for myself rather than just drawing in my sketchbook. But I’m learning that the time factor is less relevant if I’m doing what I love. Time just slips by as I engage in my processes of making art. If it feels like work, it’s too exhausting, but if it’s a joy to create then I can work for longer.

In my ongoing investigation into how my drawings look on brown/warm coloured substrates, I made the book out of such papers. I had some fun playing with fonts and layouts in order to get the list of words onto the insides of the cover and printed them in brown. Then I set to and made my sketches. I decided to use a limited colour palette, thinking back to Coritta Kent’s prints which I studied in an earlier assignment. The brown pages give the book a ‘vintage’ look, and I thought back to my school textbooks, which were printed in black and one other colour, as printing was charged for by the number of colours used. I thought a similar colour palette might work in this book. 

Lastly, I included in the binding some scraps of Kraft paper so I could include some writing. When I made the book I didn’t have a clear idea of what I might want to write, but I thought the drawings might prompt me to want to say something, so I included the scraps in anticipation of something unknown.

Here’s the book.