I’d like to talk for a second about a blog I sometimes look to for inspiration. The blog (http://diterlizzi.com/home/) is that of children’s book illustrator Tony Diterlizzi. His style and use of a combination of traditional and digital media are a heavy influence even on my animation work. In all honesty, he doesn’t update it as much as I’d like, but many artist’s blogs have completely fallen by the wayside I guess I can’t complain. I’ve been dissatisfied in the past with blanket “animation” or “illustration” blogs, but I’m sure good ones are out there — I’m just not sure where to look. Blogs that stand out to me are ones that are updated often, show the process of the artist, and go into detail about the methods and media used.

Tonight’s in-class project was to approach six ideas or emotions, and express them successfully using any configuration/combination and quantity of solid black squares. Once again, not a huge fan of in-class work, but here goes nothing.

First, we have “Order”. I immediately thought of numerical or logical order, so I went with a motif of 4 squares subdivided into numerical values represented by black squares. Is it as obvious as I thought?

Next We have “Increase”. I wanted to do a design based on a slope, a lot like bars on a cell phone. I didn’t think it looked as interesting read from left to right, so I flipped it around. The squares increase from right to left.

Third, we have “BOLD”. I wanted a design that mimicked the way we react to bold letters in a paragraph. The eye is immediately drawn to the bold components and then we start to realize the surrounding, smaller components.

Next is “Congested”. My approach to this was something like rush hour traffic, or those animations of clotted arteries you see on medication commercials. The idea is a sort of clogged/cluttered lane, with less going on on either side.

Number five, “Playful”. This one was the most difficult concept for me, and I was surprised when I heard classmates jumping right into this one. I wanted a sense of wavy movement, because I think of playing as moving around, bouncy, a silliness with my younger sibs.

Lastly, we come to “Tension”. I approached this one thinking of a stretched or taught material or some kind, like an exaggeration of a rope in tug-of-war being pulled across the page.

Semi-false alarm, I found some of my process pictures on my mobile, these are some of the layout designs and inking plans I went through for this project. The last inking plan is the design I followed for the final piece.

My Camera is on the fritz, and the software download in pending, so I can’t get my photos on here. The Repetition Grid project was a lot of fun. I got to play with ink (one of my favorite mediums) and I got to think about patterns in a way that I had never approached before. The design I went with got some pretty harsh critiquing, but they were all valid and stuff I would have changed had I the time to rework this project. I struggled with the transfer paper, my lines showed up too dark and refused to erase, and at one point during the inking process my phone rang, which made me jump and ended up with an irregular motif tile. All in all a fun project, I enjoyed trying to bring emphasis and movement into a patterned motif like that. Excited to see what we get into next.