Project 4: The Active Motif
Color, Shape, and Movement
Due Date: June 18, 2008

Materials:

Acrylic paint, brushes, matte medium, palette knife, palette paper; bristol paper; scissors

Size:

8 4" x 5" pieces of paper, mounted in a grid on black illustration board or paper

Reading:

Chapter 7

Specific Element:

Color, Shape

Specific Principles:

Unity, Variety, Rhythm, Movement

Assignment Guidelines:

For this project you will work with 8 individual paintings in a variety of color schemes to create rhythm and movement from one painting to the next. Your focus will be on the use of color, shape, scale, and positive/negative space, and presentation, and how these elements draw the viewer through the overall design. The imagery you use will be derived from art or design historical sources.

1. Workbook exercise: listen to a piece of music of your choice. Using only vertical strips of paper, create a visual representation of the beat, melody, and major sounds in the music. Is the music fast, slow, melodic, frightening, or angry? Is there a strong base or treble line? Represent the qualities in color, through the width, length, repetition, or and spacing of the strips. Due June 12th in your process folio.
2. Choose a design motif from another culture, or from a historical art or design movement. Create sketches simplifying the main components of the design— its linear, spatial, shape, and textural characteristics— into 3 to 5 forms (lines/shapes, etc) and put these in your process folio. (Remember, you need at least three!) Crop, layer, and overlap your forms, creating figure/ground reversals for each composition. Do not repeat the same composition 8 times!  You can have compositions that are more cluttered, and that are spare. Organize the 8 compositions so that they appear unified, with visual interest, and rhythm. Do not mount your panels yet!
3. You will paint the 8 compositions in variances of color possibilities.
   1. One utilizing 3-5 of the original colors of the design motif, as observed in reality.
   2. One in the high intensity version of the original, observational colors.
   3. One in the low intensity version of the original, observational colors.
   4. One creating a figure/ground reversal between background and foreground colors of the original, observational colors.
   5. One in a primary triad color scheme.
   6. One in a complimentary color scheme.
   7. One in a monochromatic color scheme.
   8. One in a color scheme of your choosing.
4. Once each panel has been painted in its color scheme/requirements, arrange your pieces into a grid or line in which the works "flow" from one panel to the next. How you organize the panels will depend on how you can create rhythm, movement, and unity from one panel to the next, and as a whole piece. Then, with glue, mount the paintings together onto a piece of black illustration board or paper. You may choose to go back into your process folio to play around with the organization of the works before mounting them.

Grading Objectives:

1. Does the student meet material and size guidelines?
2. Are there all required color schemes present?
3. Does the student show interactions of positive and negative space, and figure/ground reversals?
4. Does the student utilize economy of design, without overloading the picture plane?
5. Does the student engage the edge or border of the picture plane, cropping if needed?
6. Is the observational color accurate?
7. Did the student create accurate high and low intensity versions?
8. Is there clear rhythm moving the viewer throughout the piece as a whole?
9. Did the student create strong focal points and directional movement in each work?
10. Is the design balanced as a whole?