> Comic Drawing Task
> Different Moods of the Line
> The Basic Concepts of Semiotics
> Introduction to Composition
> Emphasising Aspects of a Picture
> Analysing Visual Communication
Part of the group doing a three-dimensional architectural task by cutting and
glueing paper.
The first task in the course was to draw a comic strip, which had to include
the given texts in the speech bubbles. So the characters and the plot were
freely composed with the restriction, that it had to make sense with the lines
given. It was really funny to examine the comics: the characters varied from
bugs to teenagers and aliens.
The goals of the task were to get the students
familiar with working with colours
and shapes, because some of them hadn't drawn or painted anything for a while.
The comics worked also as introduction to the course topics: visual communication,
color theories and composition.
Kari
We examined the broad communicational capacity of the line by drawing different lines. It was interesting to compare the individual works to each other, because we find that we really interpret the lines similarly. The happy lines were in almost every paper round and the angry ones were angular. We continued the task by drawing two situations: at first an angry dog, which is attacking a lazy, sleeping cat and after that an angry cat attachking a relaxed dog. The idea was to examine further, how can we express many things by varying the nature of the lines.
happy angry tender menacing wild
Heikki
We touched briefly the very basics of semiotics in the course. Icon, index and symbol are very useful concepts to media assistents who will design user-interfaces where navigation bars and symbols have an important role.
We examined the concepts by drawing a picture of a phenomenon or an object
and trying to find examples, how would it be possible to visualise it iconically,
indexically and symbolically. The goal was to understand the concepts and how
to use the m in design work.
Electricity
Rami
The students started to examine the concept of composition by doing their own abstract compositions. I had copied similar sheets of black shapes to every student. The task was to make five compositions on an A5-sheet. Every one of the compositions had to contain all the shapes of one set of shapes - none of them were allowed to left out, add of put on the top of each others.
The compositions were:
> balanced
> dynamic
> restless
> heavy
> light
It was very interesting to compare the results, because there really was easy
to see similarities in the cathegories. Most of the students weren't aware
about the theories and concepts before we did this task, and still they did
the compositions "correctly". The goals of this task was to highlight, that
the "rules" in visual composition are not given fromoutside but they are constructed
inside of us all. I also wanted to give the students more time to consider
the problems of composition.
Dynamic Compositions
When examining composotion and visual effects we did a task about how to draw the spectator's attention to certain parts of a picture. The student had to draw three pictures, which contained the same items each: there had to be two persons sitting at a desk, an apple and a dog under the table. In the first picture the emphasis had to be laid to one of the persons, in the second one to the apple and in the third one to the dog. Colors were not allowed, because it would be too easy to highlight parts of the picture with a colour. The goal was to examine the different ways to emphasise the aspects. The big size of the item was very general solution, but the other ones could be find also.
One of the persons The apple The dog
Mika
The students elaborated this task first in small groups. The groups chose an ad published in a magazine. Each group had to analyse their ad according to the next questions:
- Who is the sender of the message?
- What does the message tell us?
- Why has it been sent? (in order to sell, amuse, inform...)
- To whom? (Target group, private/public)
- Through what media channel/device the message has been sent?
- What are the nuances of the message? (is it attacking, friendly, attractive...)
- What is the idea of the ad?
- Do you like it's idea and/or the visual composition?
After doing that, the group continued the work individually. Each student had a copy of the original ad, and s/he had to change the original in a way or other to renew the ad in one of the aspects mentioned above. The way of working was free.
The goal was to make the students to deeply consider the visual messages and their components. The understanding of the complexity of smaller aspects is useful to them both when designing ads themselves and when reading pictures around us.
Kari,
Petri, Taito & Sami
The changes:
The target group The target item
The sender The nuances in the expression
