Lonely hearts: Generating ideas

Finally getting round to me continuing the work on the lonely hearts column as I’m having a little trouble with my back, but the time is ticking and with the diminishing motivation due to the pain its now more than ever!

Upon choosing my first column it being: There is room for a second chair. By my wood burner and a vacancy in my heart. Mid 60s woman, seeks lively articulate fellow traveller. Devon. this column stood out to me at first as it is beautifully written and tugs on a heart string, given that each person wanting to publish a column one has a certain word count she manages to put across the urgency and longing for a partner who shares her interests and her down time. I took this column and started to highlight words that could be interpreted in many different ways, much like the Organised crime brief.

Also interpreting other ways the word could of been taken and obviously from this list of words ill give it its a small one, make a creative response from this.

I started with one of the most obvious ideas in my head, one that I had from the minute after reading the column;

The top image being the idea Of a heart placed in a wooden chair by the fair, Quite metaphoric and symbolic representing this 60 year old woman sitting by the fire in a wooden chair waiting for this ‘Lively articulate’ Gentleman. I liked this idea due to the various ways I could take this concept. it being a painting I could try different styles that I want to give off different emotions, or a sculpture which I’m still open to trying out as this is an experiment after all.

The second concept taking away elements of the first but this time really focusing on the emotion of the column, The empty chair by the fire place now taking place inside a vacant, empty heart. I liked this idea much more as it is a closed piece, it answers itself and I can have fun an stylise any aspect of it and looking at it from a sculpture stand point I can already think of materials and ways of creating it. These 2 concepts were the main pieces to take away from this column, I did do a few more sketches but if I were ever to come back to this column these would be the 2 to develop. Onto the next column.

InDesign: Zines

Wednesday Has come around meaning design workshops, Today was an important day: learning the ins and outs of InDesign apart of the adobe cloud package. It is important that we attended this tutorial as later in the year we are required to use this knowledge to make zines. At first the UI was intimidating but quite quickly came around it being an adobe program. The tutorial started us off setting up 8X A6 pages, playing around with each of the features mostly using text and images.

The images and how to scale them were easy to grasp, a little more complex than say photoshop or illustrator. Learning how to format them in different ways with boarders and so on.

but where this program interest me was the text and how accessible it can be. 

Learning about the small things like page number and editing text into any size and shape columns opening the mind to the countless possibilities this zine could have, making it completely unique. How to wrap text around images, edit text sizes, colour outlines and Drawing lines and shapes around the boarder of each page.

Its safe to say its got me excited about making my own zine which is the brief that followed after this tutorial: Make a zine about anything such as personal interests, art movements, protests and so on due in on the 18th of October. I think it’d be smart to allocate some extra time to this brief as learning to use the software would be useful to create a half decent zine.

Experiment 1: lonely hearts warm-up

Today marks the day we finally get to start the academic year with an actual brief asked to be completed and handed in by the end of the day, getting to use the studio space and socialise. That brief being word association of two words given, those words being Organised crime.

I started by making two lists if the words to see what I could associate with them, this part was fairly difficult as most of the words weren’t literal which is what I’m after, as once I’ve chosen two words I had to combine them which resulted in a witty creative response.

Some quick sketches of two words combines resulted in me coming up with the idea of crime items from various crimes such as robbery, theft and the more sinister homicide/kidnapping all lay out in an organised fashion, as I realised this was more depressing than witty I deiced to go back to the word board and pick 2 other words that could create a more uplifting approach. I had the word cabinet wrote out which could be linked to being organised, the creative response sort of wrote itself once I made this connection, the connection being a filing cabinet full of crimes all alphabetically ordered. Organised crime.

I Got to doing a little sketch as you can see on the right of the page then was ready to doing a more developed piece. first sketch was horrific, maybe I didn’t get enough sleep last night but upon trying countless times to fix it It just ended up crumpled up on the desk, never mind. Onto attempt 2.

Still not exactly how I imagined it, but you get the general idea, for a one day brief with 4 hours to develop from 2 words I wouldn’t say half bad. the reason for all this being a warm up to our 5 week long brief we were told about today, getting used to word association, as we will be taking apart lonely hearts columns (preferably from the newspaper) and creating and artistic response. This response can vary from drawing to sculpture, photograph to animation. A good warm up to get us prepared and get us thinking critically for these columns.

 

The Typography Experiments

Taking what I learned from my last seminar on typography and the wonders of it, just by chance a fellow flat mate of mine had asked my to curate a logo for his new business so what better opportunity to take what I was taught and apply it to this mini brief outside of university briefs.

I started with a small grid as a template to sketch out the characters of the logo, the business being Storage sessions, a rentable storage unit to record and film songs from artists for exposer.

 

Was rather therapeutic sketching out the 7 as I had the guidelines of the grid which I also sketched out myself,

After having both of my S’s I sketched out my 6, realising that I could probably create a whole font on this grid and idea for the future but for now just basic characters to piece together this logo. Once I had all the pieces I started putting them together in different configuartions and let my creativity let loose.

These are some of the logos so far and all have received pretty good feedback, some ideas still in generation however some of these logos are requested for further development. Logo design is something I haven’t really touched on this in depth before but is turning out great and having fun whilst doing so once the finalised ideas have been solidified they will be taken into Illustrator to be polished up!