An Exploration of Value, Field and Event

I started this assignment full of ideas and ambition. I ran into both trouble and success.

Here are my results.

First "Darkness and Light"

 Next "Off set."

Here is the Method

The trouble started as I practiced my Book Cannon. I don't know whether I'm a perfectionist or just can't get things to line up but it took me several tries. Finally with the aid of a compass I succeeded.

Now I just had to trace the boxes onto another page. The I could use a compass and straight edge to find the golden points within the box. But surprise surprise the Cannon points are not the same as the golden points within the boxes. Hmm will get back to that later.

Now I could get down to planning my pages. I had a couple of ideas first I wanted to do two pages where the field and events where related. That is create recognizable field that the event would normally exist on. Then I wanted to do another where the fields and events had less to do with each other. I also wanted to do a complex set and a simple set technique wise.

For the related events I hit on the idea of bricks as the fields with windows and doors as the events. Bricks I thought made a good field technically because I could draw and print it.  Playing around with some rough sketches I decided on one window and one door. To make the window interesting I would draw a single hanging light bulb in the golden point of the window. Experimenting with door I found that door knobs or handles where hard to line up with the golden points. However I decided to use a peep hole in the center of the door to convey it's "doorness."


Executing my brick plan became interesting. First I tried to do some math to figure out a brick field that would fit evenly into the panel created by the Book cannon.To do this I created a brick template using my drawing program. With it I was also able to firm up the measurements for the panel and make it a perfect golden rectangle. It looked like this.

For the stamped field my original idea was to carve brick stamps out of some linoleum.  Then line them up to lines carried from the template.

 The stamps came out nice.

But I couldn't control the value very well.

So I switched to a stencil method. Using a foam noddle as my printing tool.

More control better results.

For the drawn bricks the test worked better but was time consuming. The final product made heavy use of my template.

With the field done I moved onto my events. I chose to print the event onto the draw field and draw the event onto the printed field. I thought the weight of the heavy black door on the draw field would contrast nicely with the mostly white window on the printed field. I really wanted a kinda darkness and light theme.

I used another mask/stencil to create the doors shape with a piece of masking tape to create the peep whole and used the shiny part of the noodle to create a very dark door.

My simple designs proved harder to realize. For the event I choose to create a golden rectangle with one corner on the book cannon interest point and one corner on the golden point for the panel. For each panel the event would mirror the other.

For the fields I wanted to create a dark panel of closely space thick mechanical lines and a field of even gray.

I found it impossible to control the sharpies well enough to get thick even lines. And the even printed field never quite came out even thanks in part to imperfevtions in the paper and my working surface. Though I did find quickly and repeatedly tapping down ink laden paper towel is a great stress reliever.