design class – Page 2

December 4, 2010 by Tien Chiu

Booking along

The last few days have been spent working obsessively on the book (which, you may recall, is the final project for my two-dimensional design class). It’s not done yet, but I’ve made a lot of progress, including designing/weaving the fabric for the covers and three pages of the interior.

Here are the first six pages:

Here’s a closeup of the first two pages:

I still need to write some mathematical formulae in the circle, dye the handwoven fabric circle on the second page bright magenta, and fix some of the bubbles, but these pages are basically done.

Here are pages 3 and 4:

Basically as soon as the figure catches the handwoven fabric circle, it falls through a whole rainbow of colored handwoven circles. It gets up and, delighted, starts running through the rainbow colors. (Please be polite enough to ignore the awful skips in the orange and yellow sections; the loom was acting up, and I need to fix them before gluing the fabric down.) Notice how the figure transforms from black and white outline to pastel colors to bright colors to bright fuchsia fabric, as the figure gets more and more interested in fiber arts stuff.

This part is pretty much compositionally done, though I need to fix the dyes and glue the figures more permanently in place. I think I will also add some gold foil around the figure’s head on page 4, in a sort of corona or crown, representing the aha! moment of realizing that hey, fiber arts is pretty cool stuff.

And here are pages 5 and 6 (only partially done):

It’s hard to make out in the photo, but the scraps of paper behind the big red octagon are scraps ripped out of a college mathematics text. (For the geeks and Techers among us, it’s Tommy 2, aka “Calculus 2” by Tom Apostol, used for sophomore mathematics at Caltech. I have fond memories of that book, which is why I still have it 20 years post-graduation…)

Anyway, page 5 basically boils down to the age-old parental mandate, “OK, kiddo, art is fun, but you have to study/do something that will make you a living!”

Anyway, in the bottom right of page 5, you see the figure quietly sneaking past the octagon to pursue fiber arts anyway. Page 6 hasn’t been created yet; it will have a fabulously dressed figure dancing atop a crazy quilt. I think I will also give the figure hair, and more rounded contours.

Pages 7 and 8 will be the super-awesome pop-up, which I have yet to design. My strategy is to get the entire rest of the book completed (but possibly not glued down), then design the popup. That way, should I totally screw up the pop-up, I can do something quick and simple for the last two pages, and still have a pretty good book to turn in.

The cover will be handwoven fabric (the pattern of circles again), dyed yellow/orange/red, with the running figure stenciled in gold leaf. Because I’ve got it, and because I can. 🙂

November 30, 2010 by Tien Chiu

Possibly the coolest book ever

I haven’t written much the last day or two because I’ve been engaged in fairly prosaic things like catching up on sleep, and cleaning. When you make 82 lbs, 7 ounces of chocolates in two weeks, and especially when you make 40+ pounds of chocolates in three days, the kitchen winds up covered in debris. It’s rather like seeing a street full of downed branches after a windstorm, or the footage you see on TV post-hurricane. There are cut-off bits of candy pads scattered on the floor, stacks of paper separators sprawled out over a chair, 30-40 plastic containers (and lids!) on the table. There is chocolate trampled into the kitchen floor. The chocolate tempering machine is still decorated with nouveau-art dribbles of chocolate, the chocolate molds need to be washed, and the ants found the leftover marzipan (’nuff said!). I am nowhere near getting everything clean, but am chipping away at the mess. My goal is to finish cleaning everything by the end of the day Sunday. It’s a tall order, but I think I can do it.

Meanwhile, my design class is drawing to a close. We’re working on our final project, which is to be an accordion book with the theme “Transformation”. It’s due next Thursday, and has to be six pages with at least two transformations over the course of the book. Me being me, of course, I’m actually doing eight pages, extending the story onto both inside covers. This is because I want to do a really rockin’ pop-up on the inside of the last page, and in a conventionally constructed accordion book, that means putting part of the pop-up on the back cover. So of course it wouldn’t be fair to the inside front cover to leave it undecorated, so…. 🙂

Anyway, I am doing my book on my transition from a mathematician wannabe to a fiber artist, and in my usual style, have decided to make it way more complicated and difficult (and interesting) than is strictly called for. The design is continuing to evolve, but basically it starts with a black-and-white, bare-outlines tangram “person” sitting around, looking at a mathematical diagram of a circle:

1st page of my design class assignment mock-up — 1st two pages of my design class assignment mock-up

In the next frame, the person is reaching up to get the circle, which has now (not shown in mockup) transformed into a colorful handwoven fabric circle. I think the “person” also gets pastel colors instead of plain black and white, but that will be decided as I make the book.

After the figure catches the circle, it suddenly finds itself against a colorful background of handwoven fabric circles, and starts running through the circles, delighted:

In the first frame, the colors are regimented, in rows marching through the colors of the rainbow. In the second frame, the colors are much more active, with the warmer (eye-catching) colors surrounding the figure’s head and upper body, fading to purple, blue, and cool colors further away.

Then the figure runs up against a big octagonal stop sign, surrounded by mathematical formulae, and a diagonal line of “fencing”. The fencing will probably be some sort of embroidery resembling barbed-wire. At the bottom, the figure is seen sneaking past the octagon and through the barbed-wire:

I haven’t fully designed the last two pages yet, but basically as soon as the figure makes it through the fence, it transforms from a geometric figure into a Real Live rag doll, dancing amidst lots of ruffles of fabric and yarn and so on. And the final page will be one really rockin’, dynamic, pop-up of a fiber artist celebrating amidst piles of stash, tools, etc.

Which brings me to the real topic of this post: I have discovered THE COOLEST BOOK EVER!!! It’s called The Elements of Pop-Up, and it is a detailed, analytical explanation of pop-up engineering complete with little demo pop-ups! Not only that, it’s got the world’s most complicated pop-up right inside the front cover. I mean, how much cooler can you get than that???

Check out these photos:

Inside cover of "The Elements of Pop-Up"

inside page of "The Elements of Pop-Up", showing the sample pop-up as well as the detailed text. (Click to see the full-sized image.) — inside page of "The Elements of Pop-Up", showing the sample pop-up as well as the detailed engineering explanation. (Click to read the text.)

I mean, this is such a totally cool book that I almost want two copies! I know, I know, you can only read one copy at a time, but the only thing that could possibly be better than this book would be two of it, right? I am totally psyched.

So now it’s time for me to run off and read up on pop-up engineering. I want to make a pop-up just about as dynamic as that inside cover, which means reading up on what can be done and then trying to design my own. Combining it with fiber arts motifs and materials will be even more interesting!

And, um, yeah, the book is due next Thursday. But that gives me an entire week and a half to work on it, right? Surely someone as obsessive as me can turn out a really amazing book in nine days?

November 19, 2010 by Tien Chiu

Final design class project

I forgot to mention that we got our final project for design class! And it’s a fantastic one. It’s going to be a six-page, accordion-style book, with the theme “Transformation”. Whatever media (or mixed media!) we like. Encouraged to be as creative as we like about shape of the pages, materials, etc. – except that it has to have a cover of cloth over mat board.

I’m going to make mine about my artistic journey, from mathematician to artist. While I haven’t worked out the details yet, I know that the first page will be conventionally rectangular, with some very simple mathematical diagram – spare, geometric, and recognizably mathematical, in black and white with just one or two touches of color. From there the work will get progressively more and more complex, rich, colorful, and chaotic, with the final page a collage of all sorts of bright colors and fabrics, fibers, etc. on a very nontraditional page shape.

Ideas for stuff on the in-between pages include:

Kaleidescope (still geometric, but more chaotic and colorful)
Fractals (ditto)
Handwoven fabric in a moderately geometric, simple pattern
Simple and heavily geometric knitted lace, maybe “Feather and Fan”
Woven shibori fabric, ironed flat and/or left crinkled
Brightly colored collapse weave (probably samples from “Lava Flow”)
a collage of all sorts of fiber stuff, hand-dyed ruffled knitted lace, handwoven fabrics, brightly dyed mohair curls, yarn, etc. (final page)

Anyway, I’m hoping to make it a montage of my fiber arts work over the years, using bits and samples of this-n-that. Maybe even some leftover tutu material from my AIDS Rides!

As you can tell, I’m really excited about this project, and looking forward to working on it. It’s due December 7th, which gives me a whole week and a half to work on it after candy season. (Candy season comes first, of course!) Plus six hours of class time. I think I should be able to turn out a pretty good book with a week and a half of intensive work. And I should be able to weave some cloth for the covers!

One other thing I forgot to mention – during a conversation on WeaveTech about online notebooks, I published a few of my notebook pages using Evernote, a service that lets you create and sync notes between multiple computers. If you’d like to see what my “raw” notes look like, check them out at http://www.evernote.com/pub/tienchiu/sharedweaving

Bear in mind that these are totally unprocessed, so they appear as they did in my original notebook, “scribbles” and all. But I thought it might be interesting to get a look both at my note-taking process, and at Evernote, which (having rediscovered it a few days ago) I think may be the coolest thing since sliced bread.

November 5, 2010 by Tien Chiu

Free hand vs. control grip

I’m back to drawing!

I’ve switched over from Nicolaides’ The Natural Way to Draw to Keys to Drawing by Bert Dodson, primarily because Nicolaides’ book requires a live model for many of the exercises, and I haven’t got one. However, I’m coming back to a lot of the exercises in The Natural Way to Draw because I’m finding them extremely useful.

Anyway, today’s exercise in Keys to Drawing is about the free hand and the control hand, which I thought was a useful metaphor for life in general. When drawing with the free hand, you hold the pencil loosely, with the grip relatively far away from the tip, and draw quickly, using your arm rather than the small muscles of the hand, to sketch out the outline of what you’re drawing. When drawing with the control grip, you move closer to the tip of the pencil, grasp it firmly, and consolidate, finalizing the details.

I am not naturally a free hand sort of person. I tend to be methodical rather than spontaneous, systematic instead of fluid. I had never really considered my style before taking the design class – but seeing the work of my fellow students has made me realize that other, very different, styles exist. I tend to be explicitly narrative in my work (where narrative is possible), packing in symbolism and meaning; I’m uncomfortable with abstraction, because no explicit narrative is present. (That may be partly cultural; see this very interesting (and enjoyable!) essay on abstract vs. symbolic in American culture, Why Americans Don’t Like Jazz). I also tend to cram in lots of details.

In contrast, my fellow students run the gamut from bold strokes to subtle shadings. They seem to be much more comfortable with abstract shapes than I am, and OK with distorted representations of real objects. Where I agonize over the fact that I can’t draw a realistic person, they don’t want to draw a real person – instead they use a crude representation to abstract out all the details and leave only the things they want to show. It’s not that their art is better than mine, but it’s different. And the difference has me wondering.

So, as I was drawing a stargazer lily this morning, and getting frustrated because the results of my free hand drawing were misproportioned to the point where consolidation with the control grip was simply not possible, I had a flash of insight. Since I wasn’t having fun with the control grip, why not switch to just doing the free hand? So I did a series of gesture drawings and free-hand sketches of the lilies, and found that to be a lot more enjoyable. While the results didn’t exactly mimic the lily, they were pleasing to the eye and looked recognizably like a lily. They were free-form, rather than literal. This was fun!

So I’ve decided that, in drawing, rather than focusing on systematically developing skills, I’m going to focus on what is fun. I’ll still follow the lesson plan – sort of – but loosely, switching between exercises as I find stuff that I enjoy. I’m also going to let go of the idea that the drawing’s success depends on how realistic it is. Eureka! It doesn’t. An abstract, looser style is also fine.

So I think I have learned something important from design class, though it may not be exactly about design.

November 3, 2010 by Tien Chiu

Triptych

I have finished my design class homework! Here is the triptych:

"Hell", a mix of physical and visual textures

The theme was supposed to be “Dreams”, so I’m titling the triptych “Dreaming of Freedom”. It’s not great art, but it’s better than I expected to do, given the constraints. I actually rather like it, conceptually, and wish I had more time to work and develop the pieces.

Meanwhile, for the foodies, here are 8 pounds of kaffir limes:

I’ve already stripped off the peels, cut them into chocolate-dipping sized pieces, and started the candying process. I don’t generally blanch citrus peels (though you’re supposed to), but for these I decided blanching would be helpful – kaffir limes, it turns out, have a TON of oil in the peel, enough to make it unpleasantly pungent. After blanching for 10 minutes and then rinsing in cold water, the peel is toned-down enough in flavor that I think it will be delicious, once candied.

I’m really excited about the prospect of having my own candied kaffir lime peel – it’s a rare and exotic citrus fruit, and the only other one I’ve ever seen was in Granville Island’s food market, while I was honeymooning in Vancouver. Hopefully by next year my tree will be bearing its own kaffir limes, but for now, it’s nice to know I can order them. (The kaffir lime tree, by the way, is usually grown primarily for its leaves, which are often used in Thai and other Southeast Asian cuisines. I have seen very little about the culinary uses of its fruit, it’s almost always the leaves that are used.)

Later this week I intend to start candying Meyer lemon peel…I’m hoping to have a variety of candied citrus peels to dip in chocolate for this year’s candy boxes.

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