Hello there!
My third assignment in Design 1 class consisted on creating a design combining principles of form and repetition on complex grids and ink it on a 10″x10″ white illustration board.
At first we were asked to create a motif made out of two shapes combined together. I quickly sketched some options and the following photo shows what I came out with.
After I chose what I thought was my best option, the “M-inside-M” shape, I noticed I wasn’t going to have many ways to position it on the grid since I actually wanted it to look like an “M”. I created a sample of what my cell on the grid would look like and then created 25 copies of it. I shuffled them around creating different patterns and decided this were the 5 designs I liked the most.
1) 
2) 
3) 
4) 
5) 
I thought of design 3 as my strongest and chose it for developing different inking plans. The following photos show the inking plans obviously lacking of craftsmanship and exact measurements, but resemble a quick idea of what my final piece will look like.
I have to say that at the beginning I was truly disappointed with my choice of doing a 25 cell design instead of a 100 cells. I thought my motif was boring and that it wasn’t going to look that spectacular. Then, I thought that maybe if I worked really hard on my craftsmanship and did every line and every shape as it was intended to be my work could look really good and sharp and really do capture my viewer’s attention. As you can see with my past assignments, I tend to do repetitive lines and shapes and always end up creating groovy designs that make my viewer’s attention go around the picture.
In my final piece you can see the design I chose inked with extreme carefulness and craftsmanship. I came out with this repetitive pattern that in my opinion gives the impression of being in movement forming different pinwheel shapes. The following photo is a scan of my piece but since my work was too big for the scanner to detect it, the right and bottom sides of it are a little bit cropped and my margin doesn’t show. I used a 1 1/2″ white margin all around the design.
All of the critiques I received during class were very positive. A group of my classmates were assigned to do a critique of my piece and mentioned my effort in craftsmanship had pay off. My work was sharp and neat and that the border I had chosen worked out really good. They also commented that my motif had created a well executed pattern and that my job had a lot of variety because of the way the motif was positioned and how the shapes were filled or left blank.
My other classmates commented that I had worked well the negative and positive spaces and that it really attracted the eye. I had a wide variety of diagonals creating different angles and that it wouldn’t look good if I had rotated the cells differently.
One of my classmates said that my design gave her the impression of pop art and that she would have liked it a lot better if it had color. Another of my classmates responded that in his opinion it looked more objective in black and white and gave the impression of being stamped in the board.
Thank you for reading!
M
