Free Water

Pictured left is my propaganda poster. The poster aims to discourage people from using bottled water as a source of water. Water is a need, not a want in life, and thus should be free. As the poster states we don't pay for air which is a need for life, so why pay for water? The idea for not using bottled water was inspired by One Drop Foundation's initiatives that encourage individuals to set goals for themselves to conserve water. One Drop Foundation, who's mission goal is to provide water to everyone, believes that water is essential to life and should be free and accessible to everyone. I used the "rays" of blue that come from the circle to help make the poster visually engaging, directing the focus on the water bottle and the water that is escaping from it its prison. This pattern is seen in older styles of propaganda. For the water bottle I wanted to create a water bottle where the water was visible, and I also wanted the water to look as if it behind "bars" inside the wear bottle. I first created a 3D model of a water bottle in Illustrator, but didn't like how it looked. So, I then saved the 3D bottle as a jpg, and brought it into Illustrator. I then divan image trace of the 3D water bottle to get what is now the final water bottle that is shown in the poster. I added the text above to show that water should be free, and the text below to further explain what the poster was about. The circles in the mid and bottom section of the poster were used to fill in empty space, and also to continue the ongoing shape of the big circles that contains the water bottle. It's not "we want to drink water," it's "we need to drink water."

Problem Solving

I would say that I use convergent thinking more than divergent thinking. I like to have clear idea of what I am doing, and I like to have a visual in my head of what the end product will look like. However, some of the time my convergent thinking turns into divergent thinking. Sometimes when designing I change my mind and don't like my visualized end product. When that happens I usually don't have an end visual, and I tend to not know how the final product will look like. For example, for out letter abstraction exercise in DTC 355, I had somewhat of an idea of what I wanted to do, but I ended up just experimenting around with the letters. My original convergent thinking turned into divergent thinking.

Art, Design, Performance, Cirque and Quadcopters

Posted below is a link to a video made by Cirque du Soleil, ETH Zurich and Verity Studios called "Sparked." The video incorporates design, art, performance, quadcopters and problem solving. The creators of the video wanted to hide the quadcopters, but at first they didn't know how. They tried many, different things to try to conceal the flying machines, but nothing was working. The creators though, did like how lights looked on the quadcopters and wanted to incorporate that into the final design. In this case the designers and creators used divergent thinking. This is because the designers and creators were all over the place and there was no clarity to how the final piece would look like. In the end lampshades with designs on them were used to hide the quadcopters in the video. Below is a link to the video as well as a link to a behind the scenes video of "Sparked."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6C8OJsHfmpI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YqUocVcyrE&list=UUPiWIjwDZQo3UobMqvi4ggg

Illusion of Movemen

The image below is from a page in Marvel's four part comic series that is based off of Cirque du Soleil's show KA. The image shows the illusion of movement. The movement can be seen as one of the characters seems to be reaching down in one of the panels, while in the other panel the same character is reaching out with her hand towards us. The "bubbles" that surround the two characters shows how they might be underwater and are swimming. The way the one character has her arm shows that she is moving down. In the other panel her arm is coming towards the viewer which shows her swimming back up to the surface. Without the "bubbles" the characters would seem like they are falling; the "bubbles" slow down the movement. The page as a whole shows movement, and every piece in the page works together to convey it.

AJW

I chose to manipulate the letters"A," "J," and "W." The letters are my initials. The letters that I used weren't originally symmetrical, so even though the final images look symmetrical they really aren't. Up close the images are slightly different from their left and right sides. I first took all of the sides of each letter and stretched them out to the corners of the art board to form an "X" shape. I then just manipulated the shape to get a desired look. The letter on the far left and far right are more complex, while the letter in the middle is less complex. At the end I added a brush stroke to the letters.