Independent Project #1

For this project we had to the freedom to create anything we wanted. The subject and media were open-ended. I originally wanted to do a linoleum print similar to the DON'T RAPE print I did last year in 2D Design. I planned out the text but I had trouble fitting what I wanted to say on the linoleum. I felt like my message was not effective being so small. I decided to explore another idea. I knew I wanted to work with text which is why I kind of kept with that idea. Maybe a year ago I came across an artist named Rora Blue who created the "unsent project". She collects submissions from all over the world of things people wish they had said but never did. She then arranges them how she pleases. I really like the idea of art being interactive. I was also inspired by Frank Warren who created the PostSecret Project. People will mail in their secrets in the form of postcards and they'll be posted online (anonymously of course) or published in his book. I wanted to do something like both these artists.

My first task was coming up with a prompt. This was hard because I wanted something open-ended that could either be taken super seriously or taken as funny. I decided upon "I wish I could go back...". Everyone has things they wish they could do over and I thought it'd be interesting to see what those things were. This is one of the few times (if not the first) time I've worked digitally for part of an art project. I found a ticket template in Pages and added my text on top of it. I knew I wanted to incorporate color in my project but I wanted to keep it very simple and pleasing to the eye. For these reasons chose to work with the primary colors. After creating my template I went to the print shop and had my design printed. They were smaller than I thought they were going to be but it ended up working out fine. I then sed the paper cutter to cut the tickets up and handed them out to people asking them to fill them out with the first thing that popped into their head when they read the phrase. A lot of people wrote down places they had vacationed to, or summer or even specific grade levels or years. It's interesting to read them because the reader sometimes has no idea what memory the writer wants to return to. There's something intimate about knowing what's important to people.

The next step was manipulating the answers. I looked through all the responses seeing if I could pair or group them together. I didn't end up using any of the matches for a final product. Two of the answers stuck out to me "I wish I could go back to us" and "I wish I could go back and fix things before they got worse". They are so open-ended and even though I didn't write those responses they make me draw on my own memories. I wanted to keep the manipulation minimal because I wanted the words to speak for themselves (another good thing about the tiny text was that it forces the viewer to come closer to the art). I did pure contour line drawings of a hammer and then two champagne glasses clinking together. These simple images relate to the above answers. Again the goal was to keep it simple. I was happy with this idea. I then tried to think about how I could activate the negative space. I wanted to do watercolor but I hadn't used watercolor paper and the paper was technically only for "dry-media". Nevertheless, I attempted to add a watercolor wash to these pure contour drawings. This did not work out and I ended up strongly disliking the outcome. This was a "beautiful oops" moment and I used black construction paper to cut the shapes out and paste it on the back of the page. Fortunately, I only started the watercolor on one of the drawings. I manipulated the other one by cutting the white shape out and pasting it on black construction paper. My style is very simple and clean in this project. Although there is a lot of negative space I think it works in this piece.

My project came a really far way. There is little correlation between my original project idea and the end product. I really loved the interactive part of this piece; it is definitely something I want to pursue in the future (but with a different prompt).