Typography

I had only worked with letters/wording in art a few times so I am still getting used to it! This assignment, however, furthered my understanding of letters as forms sometimes with and sometimes without meaning.

The first piece I did was a representational composition. I traced the contour lines of a photo, edited slightly, and lined each path with a letter. I changed the font size of the letters and overlapped paths in order to make certain lines stand out more, flow more nicely, or create density.

This piece is based off of the artist we looked at in class, David Carson. He used letters as forms and ordered different words or letters in order to make an interesting composition. This is a quote by Salvador Dali, "Have no fear of perfection, you will never reach it". The first phrase phrase of the sentence I repeated to show the obsessiveness of someone who only tries for perfection. With the rest of the quote, each word got bigger and more pronounced leaving the last word "it" as the largest. By doing this, the last part of the quote, seems more pronounced and important, and you can feel the message rather than just reading it.

With this abstract design, I tried to focus on the letters as forms and play with layering and opacity in order to create depth within the shapes. The lines that move between the swirled shapes are simple "I"'s layered with different opacities to create an illusionistic line. The swirls are layers and layers of random letters in different opacities.

With my 6 word bio, I wanted to use some expressive qualities of the words while also creating an interesting composition fitting the 6 words together. They make up me so they should all be connected in some way. I combined methods that I had used in the other pieces, like changing the opacities, making the word "small" feel small, making letters look like forms with the word "love" and creating letter paths.