Chapter 8 Hollow outlines

I have to admit that I struggled a bit with this chapter, I think there might be a pattern (no pun intended) here, that faced with designing with abstract shapes my mind seems to hit a brick wall.
In this chapter we had to design with outlines of objects and look for a suitable shape, which I now think is the key to this, pick the wrong shape to start with and all is lost :-(

Well I went back through my sketch book and finally came up with a selection:


1/7/1


1/7/2

Not very inspiring!!!!!!

Anyway, here's what I chose and the resulting experiments.


1/7/3

This felt a little better and I was very excited to find the boat house with so much graffiti to play with.


1/7/4

And the final design was beginning to feel a lot more free, so on reflection I think I need to remember that the early experiments are only warming-up exercises.


1/7/5

The next exercise was more to my taste, as I felt a bit more confident having settled on a design format for all the pieces.

I used the same motif for the design that I'd developed in the final design in pic 1/7/3 and just turned it various ways until I achieved a satisfying linear pattern that was then machine stitched, without thread, through 6 layers of different papers.


1/7/6

All of these pieces were then put back in different orders on 6 different BG papers using different attachment processes.


1/7/7


1/7/8


1/7/9


1/7/10


1/7/11


1/7/12

I was quite pleased with this set and enjoyed the challenge of coming up with 6 different designs using the papers I'd made on a previous chapter.

Having been away for 3 weeks and not had time to even look at my coursework, I found it very hard to get my head round the last part of this chapter, which required using a shape within a rectangle, removing and manipulating parts to develop designs.
Once again I realised how important it is to have the right shape to start with, so had several false starts.
Finally I decided to resort to the computer and use Photoshop for inspiration and ease of manipulation.


1/7/13

The object of this first part was to see how many pieces you could take away and still have a workable deign, my last one uses only one piece of the original design.


1/7/14

This last composite was all about using colour and texture in a creative way with the design shapes. After a shaky start I did find that I enjoyed parts of the chapter and learnt a great deal about designing with abstract shapes.

I have kept a record of the computer processes used in each of these designs which will be entered in my workbook, hmmm! when I have it up and running.