FiNAL
i t e r a t i o n s
c u l t u r e
Broadly speaking, most people know what a banana is; as an ordinary and fairly easily accessible item, a banana is a quickly recognizable subject for art, meaning the applicability of an art piece with that as the subject is likely much broader than that of a culturally or generationally specific object. Similar to my piece for MYTH, It’s Just a Tomato, much of artist Ryan Putnam’s work aligns with both a palette of primary colors (+ secondary green) and the use of ordinary objects like fruits as subjects. In my work for AESTHETiCS, while I didn’t necessarily follow the theme of ordinary objects to the extent that fruits do (often not culturally, generationally, or socioeconomically specific), my personal aesthetic appears prominently in the color palette of primaries (+ green), as exhibited in my previous works. With a consistent theme of old technology—phone box, film camera, boombox, Walkman—the use of color was allowed to shine without excess distraction from the subject or content of the work. In a similar manner, Putnam’s simple line work and isolated subjects eliminates the possibility of the viewer getting distracted by secondary elements, making the color stand out as a primary element of consideration as well.
t h e o r y
Insinuated by the unit title itself, there is no doubt that aesthetics (contemplation and judgement of sensory expressions) should come into action with my recent work. From an outside standpoint, the prevalence of aesthetics in terms of cohesive color usage, subjects being thematically organized, and design details (such as the way a line of one object either cuts off another object or recedes backward) may not be overly present, but in the making of the work, these deliberately thought-out design elements—which I’ll discuss in the next portion of this discussion—make all the difference in how the viewer perceives my artwork. Ryan Putnam, too, evidently pays attention to aesthetics in terms of viewers’ own sensory expressions to their work, evidenced by their commitment to a given style of line work or color for specific collections. As a prominent example of this, consider their pear and banana shown above: both exhibit the same line weight and spray-paint-like texture, making clear the intention of aesthetics being exhibited by unifying design choices.
With the nature of vector art comes the inherent use of representation (something that stands in for and takes the place of something else) in the form of object simplification. When creating my work for AESTHETiCS, I had to determine which shapes—and thus, which colors to fill these shapes—from my source image felt most important to represent the subject I was trying to depict. Creative decisions in this regard can make a huge difference; consider if I hadn’t included the buttons on the telephone, for example, and how that would impact the phone’s cohesiveness with the rest of my designs. Putnam’s use of representation becomes clear with not only deliberate color choices, but also in their use of texture in the banana and pear. Similar to my work, Putnam also had to make creative decisions for a simplified color palette in the pear and apple based on what these items look like in reality.
p r a c t i c e
In my creation for AESTHETiCS, my primary goal was to make obvious the use of (mostly) monochromatic color palettes for each object. Beginning with four source images, I used a combination of shape tools (5th icon down in first column on advanced toolbar) like the rectangle tool (both standard and rounded) and the ellipse tool as well as features like shape modes and pathfinders (Window > Pathfinder). Particularly in the creation of the telephone, I experimented with using the pen tool as little as possible with the aim to make creative use of simple shapes that would be quickly recognizable by even a small child. Ryan Putnam seems to use a similar technique of applying simple shapes to create more organic (or rigid, depending on the artwork) shapes, as seen particularly in the “YUP” piece shown above. My palette choice of primary colors (+ secondary green) also derives from this connection to the simplicity of a child’s visual understanding of the world, thus creating an unspoken flow within the work’s elements. To bring this color into play for two of my objects, I made use of Live Paint (Object > Live Paint > Make) to fill my paths; for the other two, I simply made use of the black arrow tool (1st icon in first column on advanced toolbar) and eyedropper tool (11th icon down in the first column on advanced toolbar) to select and alter the color of filled shapes based on a pre-selected primary color. While I’m uncertain which technique—if either—Putnam uses, the yellow head in their artwork depicting a blue outlined figure (shown above) could very well be achieved by altering the stroke and fill colors in the properties panel. After filling the colors in my own work, I experimented with alignment tools; however, I didn’t like how these features spaced each section according to edge-to-edge width/height without considering visual weight of the way one background was tilted in relation to another, hence my conclusion to space the sections manually. In future work, I would like to experiment with gradient texture as Putnam does in artworks like the “YUP” print and the fruit works depicted above.
i t e r a t i o n s
REMEDiATiON
i n s p i r a t i o n
c u l t u r e
With the fascination in ordinary objects of life—a primary element of my personal aesthetic—naturally comes the involvement of childlike things, whether that be in colors, shapes, or feelings. A young child, one may argue, is vastly more willing to make oddly detailed observations of an apple, such as the way its sticker may be funnily placed, or a brown spot may form into an amusing imaginary shape. While not necessarily focused on ordinary objects themselves, L.A.-based digital creative Christopher Lee uses fairly simple concepts like designing entertaining “prize toys” for Wendy’s to synthesize characters that hit at a beautifully ordinary emotion of children: happiness. In a very different manner, my piece for REMEDIATION applies the childhood/elementary feel in a much more subtle way with its use of basic hues: yellow and blue. With the understanding of these two colors being 2/3 of the primary colors, there is an inherent simplification of the work overall, making it even more easily digestible. The objects, a yellow cleaning glove and blue cloth, also fill their place as simple, ordinary objects of everyday life. In much of my work, this combination of primary colors (with a shameless feature of secondary green at times, of course) with the mundanity of simple objects hits to the core of my personal aesthetics: to bring unexpected, freshly perceived attention to objects that are seen every day, but never truly observed.
t h e o r y
As with any creator and their creations, copyright (legal protection granting creators of original works control over whether and how their content may be used by others) is a logistical element that can feel trivial in that it can so easily be disobeyed; however, lawsuits and billions of dollars later, law has proved copyright restrictions to be strictly enforced, especially when it comes to business-level branding. Christopher Lee has dealt with the concept of copyright not only through the legal protection on their own work, but also because of their involvement with businesses like Wendy’s and Target, which have their pre-existing, copyrighted branding. Unlike Lee, my work obviously doesn’t deal with copyright beyond the protection of my own work, but simply considering the topic of copyright again serves as a valuable reminder that I, just as any creative, must keep in mind that every creative has this protection. With good practice in checking licensing on “ingredients” I intend to use and in pushing myself to create fully original content, my creativity is bound to progress.
Vital to the discussion of copyright, attribution (legal acknowledgment crediting a creative work to its author) allows pre-existing work to be shared (and repurposed, if applicable). Alongside their board game design for Target’s exclusive version of LIFE, Lee included the names of both the client (Hasbro) and the director (Samantha Ventura), proving that in the making of this work, they are recognizing the pieces—in this case, people/businesses and their ideas—that contributed to the end design. While Lee is responsible for the work and likely much of the design elements in play with this work in particular, the creation wasn’t made “from thin air.” From the very opening of ART 118 this semester, attribution—although at a smaller ‘scale’ when compared to the criticality of Lee’s attribution practices—has been thoroughly emphasized. As with all of my work for this class, my piece for REMEDIATION includes an attached caption on my Express page to document the creator and licensing of my source image. With strict practice of documenting attribution right away during my completion of the ARCHIVE unit, the process of doing so in my later works now comes innately.
p r a c t i c e
In creating my multiple iterations for REMEDIATION, I relied heavily on the pen tool (3rd icon down in the left column of the advanced toolbar) and the Live Paint feature on Adobe Illustrator. After choosing my source image, I began working with the pen tool to first trace the outlines and then the inner contours of the yellow glove and the blue cloth. After copying these contour lines onto another art board, I created custom width profiles on my second art board (where my original outlines were created on) using the width tool (8th icon down in the left column of the advanced toolbar) to emphasize outlines and give a minor sense of three-dimensionality to an otherwise flat drawing. Lee’s work appears to use a similar technique in emphasizing certain lines and even distinct parts of a given line, such as in the varying line width in the bark detailing on the tree trunk in one of their works depicted above. After playing with the width tool, I returned to my uniform width line drawing and made use of the live paint technique (Object > Live Paint > Make) to create five variations of colorways, all on separate art boards. For one of these colorways, I used the keyboard shortcut “I” to sample a color directly from the source image in each closed shape area and then used keyboard shortcut “K” to fill the shape in with the color form my eye dropper tool. For the other four colorways, I used my own pre-selected shades and tints of yellow and blue to live paint into the shapes. In selecting my own shades and tints, I referenced my source image to choose four variations of yellow and then four variations of blue that I thought best represented the glove and cloth in a simplified manner. To play with highlight and shadow, I swapped around the darkness and lightness in a couple of my art boards to create an inversion of sorts. In other art boards, I swapped the yellow of the glove with the blue of the cloth to play with color. While I can’t see the active process or behind the scenes evidence of Lee’s work, it is undeniable that they partook in a similar process of creating multiple colorways and design variations for the same concept, especially when dealing with business clientele. In the final iteration of my work for REMEDIATION, I made use of the Image Trace tool (Window > Image Trace > “Preview”) to experiment with Adobe’s ability to quickly translate my source image into vector graphics. In contrast to this technique, Lee’s work appears to be done directly by hand, not pulled from a source image. Looking at their art, particularly the flying gorilla depicted above, I’m inspired to try making my own characters using tools like the pen tool and live paint tool that I have already been using. In further learning, I’d also like to experiment with textural elements like the moss on the tree trunk in Lee’s work, or the gradient in the gorilla’s wing.
i t e r a t i o n s
REMiX
i n s p i r a t i o n
c u l t u r e
As defined in my personal aesthetics statement, I have grown through both my personal and artistic realms to develop a fascination with ordinary objects. In my MYTH iterations, I highlighted this through the use of a tomato and a crinkled paper texture, both items that are much too often overlooked. There is a common misconception that because humans know generally what a paper looks like when crumpled, they know what a specific piece of crinkled paper looks like in a specific moment of time; however, this is where the difference between a conceptual and a perceptual perspective becomes clearly present. In an effort to target the perceptual minds of my audience in Coronanana (my collective iterations for MYTH), I played with the scale of ordinary, recognizable objects such as bananas and newspaper to present a globally-universal content: coronavirus. While my focus in this work expanded to a larger theme, I often create work with no broader intention other than bringing focus to the mundanities of life. In a similar manner, digital creative Martín De Pasquale tends to use the exaggeration of scale on ordinary objects to seemingly do nothing more than create entertaining, lighthearted takes on ordinary objects/occurrences like eyeglasses, soccer games, and soap bars in a bathroom sink.
t h e o r y
With the consideration of culture (the human development of knowledge, beliefs, and behaviors that depend upon social learning) in creating art, an artist has the capability to intentionally create a more universal or more niche audience. With my use of simple colors, bananas, newspaper, and the human form, I intended to play off the idea that each of these items are easily recognizable across most cultures, allowing the potential audience of Coronanana to effectively broaden. Considering this universal connection, the goal of the work is to bridge national cultures as a way to understand what global culture is, a goal evidently achieved by the COVID-19 pandemic. With the pandemic came the emphasis of news publications and a question of where validity comes from in the most uncertain of times, which is a piece of this “universal culture” that I’ve expressed through the newspaper splayed across the right side of my composition. While not in direct relation to this theme of the coronavirus experience, Martín De Pasquale’s work certainly portrays a recognition of how the use of ordinary objects allows for a more universal audience (at least among those who are familiar with products of industrialization such as skyscrapers, eyeglasses, and bathroom sinks).
A product of remix culture itself, derivative works (the legal term for new content created in full or in part from one or more pre-existing works) make up a vast majority of the digital art world. Because I made use of images that had been previously photographed in my creation of Coronanana, my work is certainly classified as a derivative work, just as is my creation for MYTH. In using these pre-existing images of bananas, newspaper, and a man dressed in PPE, I created a entirely new composition out of other works, which is the tendency of humanity as expressed by remix culture. As expected, Martín De Pasquale also creates derivative works; consider the use of previously taken pictures of the bathroom sink and the skateboarders present in one of their works that I’ve included above.
p r a c t i c e
My goal with this work was to take individual, representational photographs and piece them together into a color-blocked, imagined scene of relatable elements. As a result, the technical process of creating this REMIX iteration began by making use of color fill to establish a solid background (new adjustment layer in the layer panel + “solid color” + my personal choice of a green hue). To allow one portion of the bananas image to show while covering the rest, I then used the polygonal lasso tool (within the 3rd icon in the left tools panel) to select the portion I wanted to show and proceeded to create a layer mask that would cover the rest. In creating the newspaper collage on the right side of my composition, I used the healing brush tool (within the 9th icon down on the left tool panel), which I also made use of in my work for MYTH. As I continued on to create the shadows of the figure in PPE for Coronanana, I experimented with manually drawing out the shadows of the person’s legs using the brush tool (9th icon down on the left tool panel) and found that using a brown-ish hued shadow worked more effectively on the yellow area of the lower leg compared to the black-based shadow I used over top of the blue crate. Digital creative Pasquale seems to use a similar technique (although likely more advanced and efficient in skill) for bringing shadow into their works of exaggerated scale. While their work doesn’t intend to be realistic, the use of these shadows makes their art more believable as a unified scene (despite its intentionally false/exaggerated nature), an inspiration I will continually strive to follow in my future works. As my skills and knowledge of software progress, I aim to achieve the same natural integration that Pasquale’s shadows brings to their works.
i t e r a t i o n s 1, 2, 3
MYTH
i n s p i r a t i o n
c u l t u r e
Living in a world of constant complications—technological errors, incomprehensible paperwork, political turmoil, etc.—ordinary objects have become lost. Not many people still think about the process of a metal key mechanically opening a door lock, of a paper stamp allowing a letter to be physically transmitted by other real people to its destination, and of a clothing hanger’s ability to hold a shirt upright for decades at a time. In other words, ordinary objects and processes still exist, but they are vastly blurred by modern novelties, one of the primary reasons I wish to experience the 1990’s, a time when, I’d argue, mundanity was more recognized. With a passion for the “cookie-cutter” pieces of everyday life (rubber ducks, paper clips, apples, etc.), I strive to represent these items in a manner that helps others to truly recognize their presence. In choosing an image for my MYTH iterations, I focused on simplicity: a red tomato placed in a muted red background. Throughout the process of manipulating this image, I placed emphasis on the entity of the tomato itself by making use of primary colors, which inherently reference childhood simplicity, in the background and highlights. Much alike, Felicia Simion, Photographer and digital artist based in Bucharest, Romania, tends to make use of the power and simplicity of the color red in many of their works, as well as the blurred silhouettes of human forms. Additionally, when representing human forms, Simion either takes a surrealist approach or an overly-simplified, yet repetitive, approach to emphasize the intrigue of the human form itself and of the human interaction with everyday life, a concept that is wildly fascinating to me.
t h e o r y
As mentioned in my “CULTURE” portion, I chose the tomato as my image out of intention for simplicity, and I made use of primary colors to essentially encode (to establish meaning in a creative work intended to communicate with an audience) my work with the message that mundanity is much too often ignored. After someone views my piece, they are intended to step away noticing that they just spent active time of their day looking at a tomato—that’s it. The point is not to be extraordinary in art, but rather to do just the opposite in a manner that’s innovative enough to draw an audience, yet simple enough to minimize busyness. Considering that most of their works feature simple shapes in both the negative and positive space of something like human body positions, Felicia Simion seems to follow a similar mantra with encoding elements of plainness into their work—of which could very well extend to deeper personal meaning that an outside viewer is likely unaware of.
Creativity (the ability to bring something new into existence) is boundlessly prevalent in society of the present and of the past through the form of (to name a few) mechanical/technological inventions, fine art techniques, and environmental activism solutions. In It’s Just a Tomato, my work of MYTH iterations, the implementation of creativity lies within manipulating color and design, particularly in the background—considering my intention of leaving the tomato itself mostly as-is, the way it exists in everyday life; the swirl of blue and yellow is meant to draw the viewer into the yellow of the tomato’s highlights, which then leads to the tomato itself. Simion expresses creativity in a varying manner, relying heavily on repetition and surrealism to create entirely new, unexpected scenes for viewers.
p r a c t i c e
In designing my first iteration of It’s Just a Tomato, I first altered the original image’s color and lightness/darkness through the use of adjustment layers (which I created using the “layers” icon in the bottom right corner of the screen and proceeded to adjust through the use of the panel on the right side). By adjusting hue & saturation relative to specific color groups and making use of layer masks (which I created using the paintbrush tool on the left tool panel, also ensuring that black was shown as my foreground color in the third icon from the bottom), I was able to make the blue & yellow swirl of the background while intensifying the saturation of the tomato’s redness and its yellow highlights. During this process, I came to realize I had also inherently created a digital artifact, as shown in the pixeled texture in the highlight and shadow of the tomato, which helped to emphasize the content of my work. In my second iteration, I used the healing brush (within the 8th icon down on the left tool panel) in conjunction with a second image file to further emphasize the blue portion of the background. By sampling from an image of paper texture, I was able to recreate the effect of its crumples without taking away from the color of the blue background. To minimize unnecessary distraction, I also retouched some minor areas in the tomato’s highlight using the spot healing brush (within the 8th icon down on the left tool panel). Similar to the way I manipulated the color of the tomato’s background, Felicia Simion’s work depicting nine plastic grocery bags appears to use some type of hue adjustment tool to transform the bags into a red depiction without taking away from the texture and shape of the bags themselves. Much of their work also highlights repetition, which is something I could somewhat replicate in my work using the marquee tool (2nd icon down on the left tool panel) and the clone stamp tool (10th icon down on the left tool panel).
i t e r a t i o n s 1 & 2
ARCHiVE
personal aesthetics statement
Much too often, ordinary objects are overlooked, art is taken seriously only if it fits in professional terms, and the functionality of something repurposed is overshadowed by modern goods of lust and reputation. Described in terms of the simplest elements of the alphabet, I am the aura of saying “A is for apple”. My motivations lie in the blank, blue Fruit of the Loom crewneck that your grandpa wears, in the jar of pop tabs your teenage brother has on his desk, and in the green peas that rolled off your little sister’s highchair table. If anything would describe who I am in images, it would be the mood of a Google stock image itself: mundane. Slider phones and film cameras of the 1990s boast the subtleties of an era I wish I could explore not necessarily for the historical moments or the top hits, but to see that paper clips, glass bottles, primary colors, and rubber ducks haven’t changed. My aesthetic will always exist in the same manner that the drawn line of a graphite pencil or the negative space of a clothes hanger does—in the most ordinary of descriptions.