I had the best time messing up my map. I let my cat scratch it, I wrote on it, I put fake blood on it, I created fake open sores, I put my makeup on it, I stepped on it, I ripped it up, and many other tortures. It was a map of my home state, Florida. And the experience was incredibly cathartic.

When it came time to create something beautiful, I decided to include some of the biggest themes in my life, Disney and Flames. I ironed out my messed up map so it would be flat, pasted it to a board, cut out the disney castle, burned it, and glued it to the map. I wanted you to see past the glittery exterior of Disney to the pain beneath it. Every line on the map is representative of an experience or feeling that I’m still trying to process and move on from.

Critique was so wonderful. My class and Professor are so completely encouraging and kind, it was really such a wonderful experience. They pointed out some small design flaws such as how I could’ve strengthened the feel of the arches above the castle, and I’m very grateful for the feedback, because it was very contructive.

I hope you appreciate it. The point of art is to share, no matter how personal.

When arranging these letters and numbers, I wanted to do something different. I thought about the ABC’s books I’d known, and wanted to do a variation of a kid’s book. I decided to make a childish book, with each page a different word of a 9-word panagram. My sentence was “The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.” I wrote each word on a page with a different found page number.

The class’s critique said that I could have included illustrations. I had thought about this possibility, and agree with them. But since I’m not very good at drawing, and didn’t want to collaborate with someone for schoolwork, I decided not to bite off more than I could chew.

Let me know what you think!

Counting down for suspense…

When in the concept phase, I came up with an idea that there could have been an explosion, causeing jack and jill to need water, but the water was guarded byu a magical wizard who would ultimately deny them. My group agreed that this was a funny and interesting way to go about it, so we took that direction. Over the course of the project though, we evolved the idea to have a bear deny them the magical water of the fire hydrant.

I did the first two panels, where Jack and Jill (depicted by a Ying and Yang symbol) are next to their exploded car, and are perplexed by what to do. In the next panel, they’re directed by a comic hand pointing them up a hill, showing them the journey they’ll need to embark on.

My lovely group partners Lee and Amanda continued to show Jack and Jill questing and failing. I’d like to mention quickly how great it was to work with Lee and Amanda. Lee and I became friends at the beginning of the quarter, so I was istantly happy to be paired with him. And I had never had much chance to talk to Amanda, but the more we worked together the better friends we became, and I can say I really enjoy her company.

Critique went very well, and we felt very confident about the work we were presenting. The main negative feedback we got was just the part about the crown in the first panel creating a sense of horror vacui. This was my compositional design, so I hope that OI didn’t negatively affect my groupmates in any way by this weaker design.

I had a fantastic time doing this project and hope you all like it!

Another thing many people know about me, is that I have bipolar disorder. I don’t talk about it in professional settings often, because I choose not to use medication, and many people consider that a liability to a project. I’m often considered unstable or indecisive, and to that I would agree. But I genuinely enjoy who I am and why I am this way. I think that it makes me a diverse person, and one who is particularly apt to view a situation from all angles, even if it’s often incredibly difficult to then deem one angle superior. I also like to think about how many other incredible people have come before me with similar mental obstacles, and how they’ve shaped the world. This connectivity between times and places and people, keeps me grounded; It keeps me sane. I think this is why I want to pursue a minor in art history, because I know how many of these great artworks have been produced by those like me, and gives me inspiration that I can do the same.

I tell you all those things so that you may understand my interests, and appreciate the diversity of the blogs I enjoy, without it feeling disjointed. All things work together, and that’s art.

http://eyeteeth.blogspot.com/  Eyeteeth is a fantastic blog of politics and art mixed, particularly street art, which I’m incredibly interested in.

http://thisguyoverhere.com/ This blog has it’s own website, and is beyond funny. If you’re looking for reviews of 2000′s movies, this is the place to be.

http://thedisneyfilms.blogspot.com/ OK, nobody laugh. I was raised in Celebration, Fl, a town built by Disney, and right down the street from it. I bleed Disney. (i’m not sure what they did to us, but I’m fairly sure some chemical warfare happened and now all the Celekids, a name we created, bleed pink elephants.)

http://arthistoryblogger.blogspot.com/ This one may be my favorite. As someone who really wants to minor in art history, this is my candyland.

http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/ Last but not least, I have my very favorite economic blog. I prefer learning about economics over politics, because the market is bipartisan. This blog is written by a Harvard professor of economics, and would literally be the only reason I would ever consider going to Harvard. BUt it’s still never going to happen.

I hope you guys enjoy these! If you have any other suggestions for ones I should check out, please let me know!

Firstly we had to emphasize a Congested feeling. I was thinking fairly literally on this one, with my mind rushing straight to a congested interstate coming home from school. But I decided to orient it diagonally, and represent cars in sporadic tiny black squares.

Next, I did Order. I didn’t want to just make a bunch of straight lines out of squares. So I decided to show order thorough staggered boxes, decreasing in size toward the center. I felt that the predictability gave a sense of order, while the variation retained enough balance without it getting boring. I usually try to avoid a central focal point, but given the distinction for order, it was a conscious decision. Plus, one could even argue that your eyes go immediately to the large black squares, particularly the top left since that’s where the action begins.

After order, I did Increase. I went fairly linearly with this thought, in that the squares increase in size as they approach the bottom right corner.

I’m particularly fond of my Bold piece. I thought once again, that a central focal point would be beneficial to express the idea, because what’s more bold than 2 big black squares smack dab in the middle of designs made up of small black squares?

When thinking of how Tension would manifest itself visually, I thought of scenarios that would make me feel very tense. Having just created a design that utilized small black squares to convey a horizontal sense of motion, and a congested piece reminiscent of a highway, I was in the motor vehicle state of mind. I thought of my drive to school from South Carolina every day, and how tightly I grip my wheel while crossing the bridge. And I realized nothing would make me more tense than the thought of going off that bridge. I didn’t want to completely recreate what that would look like in black squares, I wanted an abstracted version that made you feel similarly. I think what I came up with feels like a very tense crash.

Lastly, and on an entirely different note, I leave you with my Playful composition. I spent awhile appropriately playing with my playful piece, before I saw the moon in the sky from the window of the computer lab, right in the middle of the day. I ended up with a cute, fun, crescent-moon-like piece that used variation to keep it feeling very light.

As always, it was a highly enjoyable exploration!

First, we began by creating motifs by having one shape pierce another shape, creating an entirely new shape. I display mine for you now, so you may see how erratically my brain follows a train of thought, then derails it. Needless to say, 75 motifs meant a lot of thinking outside the box as much as I could.

Next we came up with some cell options. We chose a motif, then placed it within a square in any way we decided. At this point I was feeling incredibly confident. I had come up with a good amount of solid motifs, and felt that I could create something very interesting. These are some quick sketches of how I would place my motif in the cell. You can see that the last one was my favorite since I played around with it some different ways, then moved to drawing it neatly over and over again till I had one that I felt was clean and sharp enough to photocopy.

After I had photocopied my motif, I was incredibly excited. I had many different ways I could arrange it to make some cool designs, and I still felt strongly my grid could be easily subverted. After discussing it with a couple of friends in class, I decided that my particular motif would be much too busy with 100 tiles, so I went with 25. During critique however, it seems that every member of the class that I didn’t speak to, felt incredibly differently on the matter. But such is life and art, and we’ll discuss that further shortly.

We knew we’d be choosing black or white places in our final piece, but I didn’t know at this stage that I would be showing you all inking patterns separately, so when planning for white space, I just flipped some tiles over to get a feel for it. I tried out a lot of different arrangements, and these were my 5 favorites.

Next were the inking plans. I became beyond frustrated in this stage. I had felt so good about all of my work so far, but then found that my designs became significantly less dynamic without the grid. I spent more time on this stage than any other. It took days before I had something I thought looked good, but in class, Professor Waldvogel suggested I try something else, so I spent the rest of that class period cutting out and rearranging my tiles to make new inking plans. In the end, she told me just to go with my gut. Which is a terrifying feeling, when it doesn’t seem like your professor will like your work. She told me just to execute it perfectly, which I was intent on doing.

These are 3 of my possible inking patterns. I chose these not because many of the others were scribbled over in frustration (although that may be true) yet because I like how these demonstrate the evolution of thought I was going through to reach my final layout.

Remember how I told you that I was intent on having perfectly executed craftsmanship? Well I apparently didn’t accomplish that goal. I wish I could say I should’ve gotten a smaller brush, or the right ink, (miscommunications between myself and Ex Libris can really only be on me) or an exacto knife that actually kept the blade in, but I’m not a complainer, I’m a learner! And in every respect that I was lacking on this piece, I shall account for on the next!

The class was unanimous in how grey my piece was in comparison to theirs (my 6+ layers of ink did a terrible job with the incorrect brand I had), and it was pointed out that my borders were rough, and some of the lines could have been better. I agree with these people. Looking back on it now, there were many things I could have done to improve. And personally, I wish I had gone with a different motif entirely. The girl assigned to review my piece repeatedly used the word “potential” and “clunky” so there must have been something different I could have done. I thought I had done well though. And I took hours and hours like everyone else, trying as hard as possible to be concise and accurate in my inking, but we don’t always succeed. And I’m more than ready to try again on this next project to knock it out of the park!

This is my final design. Even though many didn’t like it, I still like it. I hope you do, too.

What the actual exploration was about however, was creating a focal point through concentration and isolation. Concentration deals with arranging the objects in your frame into one condensed area, as to draw the eye there. Whereas isolation is achieved by making one object on your page different in some way, so the viewer’s eyes have no choice but to be directed to the variation.

Isolation

Concentration

The Thumbnails are alot of fun, and a lot more work than I expected. But nothing makes your brain work more than the realization that it needs to be pushed!

Vertical and Horizontal Lines

Diagonal Lines

Curved Lines

Curved, Vertical, Horizontal, and Diagonal Lines

Then these are my final drafts! I’m honestly very proud of them. The class pointed out a few parts of mine that they particularly liked, and that felt amazing. They gave some slight criticisms about my occasional central focal points, but they were fantastically helpful and I hope to improve from them!

I redesigned the one with all the different types of lines, because the original one I did brought your attention to the center of the page, which isn’t a very interesting focal point. I tried to keep the sense of directionality and balance in my new design.

  My name is Alyssa Anne Theresa Goldman.

I’ve lived in Orlando my whole life, in Walt Disney’s town, Celebration. I loved it there, but I’m quite sure I’m meant to be other places currently. Specifically, SCAD. I’m a film major here, and it’s already proving to be a good decision. Film is one of the things I care most about in the world. I like the ability of a medium to connect so personally, and to illuminate parts of life people may never notice otherwise. I’m particularly fond of documentaries and hope to spend much of my future following interesting people around with cameras.

  In my current life however, I have a lovely stray cat whom I’ve named Andy (after Andromeda Black Tonks, from Harry Potter. Let that say more about me.) and who is about to have kittens! I also have the two best younger brothers in the world. I just moved to South Carolina to live with them and my parents, and commute to SCAD.

  Other than school, I also work as a Production Assistant and Talent Coordinator on live event shows, and am contracted by Freeman International. I enjoy my job more than I could explain. Working on shows or on personal projects are my favorite ways to spend my time. Yet I do enjoy the occasional sci-fy convention. Of course by “occasional” though, I mean any that I’m able to come across.

  That would be the quick summary of myself, but the beauty of my chosen profession is that it enables me to continually self-express, so as I post more of my work, you’ll know more about me than I could type here for you! Or, if we’d like to be cliche, we could say a picture is worth a thousand words. Thus, I shall spare you thousands of additional words, dwindling in eloquence as I continue, and let my work speak. I hope it will all be taken in grace, and with the understanding that it’s my goal to improve. So it may be rough at first, but let’s stick with it and see where we go.

Best Wishes!

Alyssa Goldman