Graphic Design week 2 - Illustration

Week two of grappling with stationary, I came in on Monday with my first idea and pretty much jumped the gun by starting to build my "stationary" doberman pincer. The idea came from the fact that stay  is one of the basic commands used to train a dog. Then I had to pick a dog synonymous with staying, a guard dog, and the first breed I always think of is a doberman. Not only do guard dogs have to stay in place, they can also freeze people with fear. Another interesting thing about Dobermans is that to increase the rigidity of their posture, puppies under-go a binding of their ears to make them prick up permanently. And so, to clarify the message that this is a stationary dog I made him out of my stationary..all of my stationary.. I haven't had a pen, pencil or marker in 3 days!!!

Also, another problem was the fact that the cardboard frame that gives the dog its structure was creased from the beginning, and following a dive from the table courtesy of the cleaners (I know it was an accident...) he began to develop narcolepsy and would slump down on the table from time to time. He managed to behave and STAY for the vast majority of the assessment until 10 minutes before then end, when he fainted. All snags aside the piece got a great reaction, even a few photos, so I'm satisfied it had impact at least!




The prototype




Finished piece


The second idea came from the amber light on traffic lights. I used photoshop to create an unholy 11 x 11 lane gridlock populated by monochrome cars. Then I created the amber light from a formation of 23 central cars. Now the first image is clear enough but to highlight the fact these cars are not just a randomly orange I decided to include the unlighted red and green light, particularly to underline the fact that the cars are not red- stopped.

Before I reached my two solutions Mary Nagel asked us to prototype as many of our ideas as possible, so I had a sticky tape spiderweb, which came from the idea of both the stationary spider waiting in its web for its prey and also being stuck and immobilised in a spiders web. If I had continued with this idea I would have liked to have made a floor to ceiling sized web in our studio. The second idea was using stationary to make a person -stay-. So I drew two little characters and had one paperclip themselves to the other, I would have made this into an animation. The third is a variation on the above idea of using stationery to make someone stay, a ball and chain, with the chain and manacle made of a roll of tape and paperclips and the ball made to look like note paper.

NEXT WEEK - SCULPTURE!

(How am I going to cope with a fine arts subject??? I NEED BOUNDARIES!!)