project 1: intersections
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september 1, 2020. 4:15pm.
intersection of margaret morrison street and forbes avenue.
I found a lot of juxtaposition at this intersection, and a lot of hidden profundity. Shoes hanging from the telephone wire, an empty art gallery, a graffitied and stickered mailbox…
When there weren’t any cars around, it became near silent. It was peaceful and calm. But when a car would come through the intersection, the sound was immense and jarring. In the few minutes I sat there, I saw one driver honk at a pedestrian and another wave me across the street.
I noticed a flower box on a railing. It felt so human — just an attempt at making life a tiny bit prettier. And then a giant blue bus — so glaringly human-made — drove right in front of it.
Even the building types in this intersection contrast with one another. There are multiple-story houses in pretty pastel colors right next to a series of lower-down houses with balconies. Those are all right across the street from Woodlawn Apartments, which just look like a big brown box.
I’m definitely interested to come back at rush hour and at night to see how it changes.
september 4, 2020. roughly 2:30pm.
These are the three images I took today that I think best represent this intersection. When I visited this afternoon, the intersection felt somehow the same as before and simultaneously different. Though there was still a combination of loud and quiet times, it overall felt more peaceful.
I think the mailboxes add a lot of character to the intersection, and I also think the view down Forbes with trees on one side and buildings on the other is a pretty unique characteristic of this intersection. The shoes hanging from the telephone wire are my favorite part, though.
september 8, 2020
Today I made the paper relief version of the central image above (after cropping it a bit). It took a lot of trial, error, and restarting, but I’m pretty happy with the end result. Here’s how it turned out:
I had to retrace the photo a few times. At first I made it way too detailed, and it was really difficult to cut and glue pieces that were that little. I traced the photo again, keeping in mind that I would need to cut out pieces that were pretty tiny.
To transfer the linework from the tracing paper to cardstock, I simply flipped over the tracing paper so the side that I had drawn on was touching the cardstock. Then I colored over the back side of the tracing paper with a random colored pencil. This way, I had a mirrored outline of the shapes I wanted to cut out so the pencil markings would be on the back. I didn’t just trace the whole image onto one sheet, though. I shifted the tracing paper around to use the cardstock more efficiently.
I quickly got confused about which pieces were which and how I was going to layer them, though, so I scrapped the pieces I had cut already and took a different approach. I took a picture of my tracing paper outline and opened that photo in my drawing app on my iPad. There, I used the app’s Layers capability to draw out the shapes that would be in each layer of paper. Since sometimes the shapes needed to be larger than the visible area they would have when completed, this was a very helpful way for me to see which shapes I should actually cut out and how to overlap them when I moved on to working with paper.
I also color-coded each layer so I could easily see the differences, and labeled each layer with a letter. Then, when I went to cut out the shapes from cardstock, I just started with the shapes that would be on Layer A. Once those were cut out, I wrote on the back of them which layer they belonged to. This made the final assembly a lot easier, because I could turn off all the layers on my drawing app except Layer A, and then find all the pieces I had cut out that had an A on them and glue those down. The way I went about the gluing process was pretty simple, but I think it helped me to get the spacing perfect. I put the piece down where I thought it should go, and then put the tracing paper on top of it. I would move the piece until it was in the right position, then use a little bit of removable washi tape to keep it in place. I flipped up the piece, using the tape as a hinge, and put glue on the back of the piece. Then I flipped the piece back down again, waited a few moments for the glue to dry, and carefully removed the tape.
The crosswalk was especially tricky to get right. I ended up tracing it on the cardstock with the spacing still included (ie not moving the tracing paper between outlining each line of the crosswalk), and then cut out the pieces very carefully, leaving the piece of cardstock with holes only where the pieces of crosswalk should go. I lined up that piece over the rest of my project and put glue on top of it, so that it would go through the holes where the crosswalk lines go. Then I stuck the crosswalk pieces back into the holes in the paper they came from, and peeled up the “stencil” paper I had made, leaving the lines of the crosswalk perfectly spaced out and lined up.
Today’s assignment took me a long time (but at least 1.5 of those hours were spent trying to print my photo in color so I could actually see the shapes and trace them), but I’m really proud of how the end result turned out. I’ve never tried anything like this before, so I had a good time challenging my brain at something completely new.
september 11, 2020.
Today I made the grayscale composition. It didn’t take me quite as long because I had learned from my last experience, but it was still pretty slow going. First, I used the same Procreate document that I set up for the white relief and played with the colors of each shape, using the grayscale colors that I had available to me for the physical project.
I tried placing the colors darkest to lightest from the back, and then I switched it, just so I could see what both of those looked like. I ended up choosing the option that had the darker colors in the back, because my photo has a backdrop of trees that are pretty dark. Using lighter colors for the trees than the houses just didn’t look quite right to me.
After I had the initial colors set up, darkest to lightest, I tweaked them a little bit so that no shapes overlapped with the same color. I wanted to make sure that every object was visible and that nothing got lost by blending into the same tone.
Once I had my final color design, I went to work cutting them out and gluing them down. I won’t explain the entire process of how I did that again, because it was essentially unchanged from how I did it for the relief.
Here’s the final result! I definitely think I’m getting better at cutting out shapes, and I also think I’m learning a lot more about thinking in this weird, two-dimensional but simultaneously three-dimensional manner.
(Also, a note about why I chose this photo to make my compositions out of — I think that each corner of my intersection feels very different. I hoped that this photo would best capture all three sides. I also really liked the symmetry of this picture.)
september 16, 2020
Today I created a version of this relief using a color! The bulk of the work this round went into adjusting colors and shapes in Procreate rather than the actual cutting and gluing of the paper.
After I got peer feedback on my grayscale relief, I decided to change some of the colors I was using. I eliminated black entirely, as the people in my small group felt that it contrasted too strongly with the other colors and distracted from the overall composition because of how dark it is.
I also reworked where my other gray tones went in order to improve the depth cues created by the colors I chose. Once I was happy with that, I tried adding color. I started with pink/red just because it was a pretty basic color, and I planned to change the color once I had decided what to make colored.
I didn’t think either of the above options showed enough color or highlighted what I thought was most important, so I chose to color the houses. I played around with the hue slider and decided that I thought yellow provided a good contrast with the gray. It also stayed (roughly) true to the actual color of the houses.
final conclusion
I learned a lot in this project — about photography, cutting paper, how value and hue affects the way a composition works, how important cropping is... It was a fascinating project, and while I did cut myself once or twice, I’m glad we did it. I think the most valuable piece of this for me was the grayscale relief. I struggled and learned a lot about value and how darker colors recede in some compositions but come forward in others. I’m not sure I can exactly articulate what I learned about value composition, but I think I understand it innately much better now.
