I am eating, sleeping, drinking and living art!!!

So, I recently transferred from Gwinnett Technical College to Brenau University. I’ve extended my time as a student by a couple of years but, I’m pursuing dual degrees at the same time. I will have a Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Interior Design when I’m done. Anyway, I am so excited about a class I took last semester! It’s called 2D Design and one of my favorite instructors from Gwinnett Tech, Carol Platt, teaches it. I thought it was going to be floor plans and elevations, but it was a full on art class! This class challenged and pushed my creativity to a whole other level. I have been doing so much art that I will be blogging a lot about it as well.  I am extremely happy with the direction my artistic expression is going!

This is an example of what we did in the class. The point of this project was to obscure the square using positive and negative. We had to start with an 8 inch by 8 inch square of bristol board paper.

8 inch square white bristol board

Then we used an x-acto knife to  cut out freehanded shapes on the edges of the bristol board. Once you cut out a shape, you flip it outward away from the cut. You then see the shape as two-sided, half positive and half negative.

Ergonomic x-acto knife is way more comfortable to use.

After that you just continue to cut shapes and flip them (you must also cut shapes out of the shapes). It started simple enough but I kept seeing more I could do to obscure the square. The cutting seemed to never end for me! This project seemed to be growing as I made more and more cuts.

Before I taped and moved it.

I used removable tape on top to hold it together while I moved it. I positioned it on the mat board so I could see where I needed to start gluing it down. Once I did that mounting it on the board was easy using a permanent, heavy-duty glue stick.

Starting to come together

Finally,  after I had the cuts lined up and secured with the glue stick, I cut the mat board down to size. The cuts ended up being about 16 inches by 16 inches. 

Finished product mounted on black matting

As I look at it I can still sort of see the square but it looks dimensional instead of flat. Sometimes it looks like oil and water or flowers or sometimes a wacky face with a big nose. I'm proud because it always looks really cool when I see it on my wall. It is interesting to see it morph from one thing to another while you look at it. This was a great, inexpensive way to have a great conversational art installation. You should try it!