12.02.24 – Markmaking Pattern and Movement

Rule 8 – Don’t try to create and analyse at the same time. They’re different processes.

Sister Corita Kent: Immaculate Heart College Art Department Rules

My first elective is Monochrome with Chris. Our first activity was observational drawing using a terminal strip. For all attempts, we had to draw whilst our view of what we were drawing on was covered by a piece of paper, so that our attention was looking at the subject matter. Attempts 2-3 are one-line drawings. Attempt 4 was to have any limitation, which I chose to draw with my non-dominant (right) hand.

I tried to draw the terminal strip at different angles to have more variety in my drawings. I found that I was generally better at keeping my lines relatively parallel with each other. On the other hand, for attempts 1 and 4 where I didn’t have to draw with only one line, the different structures of the terminal strip weren’t lined up at all, which may be due to how I was allowed to lift my pencil which then changed my anchor point.

We then used newsprint and graphite sticks to etch the strip. On my first piece of paper, I just etched any sides of the it as well as the top when it is curved. On my second, I tried to wrap the strip with the newsprint and then etch all sides so that they connect.

We were given 30 minutes to make an animation with Stop Motion Studio; I wanted to try something short but play around with warping the terminal strip. In hindsight, whilst I’m fine with what I managed in the time frame, I realised I focused on creating movement from the strip through etchings, rather than focusing more on the patterns.

I actually wanted to make this longer by rotating it after it finished bending back to being straight (as shown in the etchings on my second paper). However, I planned my time by having the first section (bending) animated first before moving onto making more frames for the next section (rotating) so that I had something down at least. By the end of the workshop, I only animated the first section. An alternative I could’ve done was draw these individual frames on patterned paper so that it wasn’t just on a plain background.

14.02.24 – The Media Landscape

In today’s workshop, we had time to retrieve cut-out squares from a variety of black and white images that we were interested in, then come up with two or three words that could be used to categorise said-images. With the ones I naturally gravitated towards, I said industrial. architectural, and geometrical.

16.02.24 – Paper-based animation (cont.)

Today, we focused on paper-based animation only, where we tried animating traditionally by drawing every frame on separate pieces of paper using a light box. I’m particularly interested in this area of animation, as it aligns with my general interest in 2D animation. Although expected, it was a bit more tedious as there are many frames to be drawn, meaning a thick stack of papers, and keeping track of each frame was difficult even after I had labelled and numbered them.