LJL FVL-1

Reflection

Fundamentals of visual learning aimed to introduce the basics of visual language through drawing activities using various mediums. Students were told to draw without inhibition, to develop our own ideas and simultaneously observe our representations to see if it is communicating the theme/topic appropriately.

Day 1

• The short video on line and dot gave me a vague idea of how those simple elements can be manipulated to represent almost anything that comes to mind. It made the objective of the following activity much clearer for me.

• While creating a line bank for exploring different types of lines, creating lines in such large variety was harder than I expected while trying to make them all look different from each other.

• Looking back, I was restricting myself to stay on the line I had chosen while exploring dots and squares. I realized this after the feedback I received and began varying the sizes of dots and take some outside the borders.

Day 2

• It took more effort on visualising and deciding how to represent objects such as clouds or rain and other abstract words like rhythm, power, etc.

• In the first try of rain I tried to represent it with ripples using overlapping dots along with smaller dots for rain drops. However, I felt the overlapping circles failed to represent the ripples in water because of the mostly equal spacing in between.

• I then later used them in drawing the theme rhythm as I saw they fit better while representing uniform beats.

Day 3

• During this activity I started to work more with pens and micro-tips instead of pencils. I now realize that this had made my work faster when compared to working with pencils since I wasn’t spending any time erasing and redrawing.

• While arranging dots and squares inside a page to represent shapes, I started to explore more on overlapping by using different tones and on contrasting the sizes of dots. This helped me work more freely in creating shapes out of simple dots.

• Limiting the number of dots being used in a composition could also have prevented from over-crowding the shape.

Day 4

• When drawing shapes out of other shapes that were contrasting to it (circle out of square, ellipse out of triangle). According to our mentor’s feedback, I was restricting the composition to the represented shape and it needed to be more free. However, I also felt a certain limit to the freedom since the result had to represent the assigned shape.

• It was a challenge to find a balance between the two when drawing and I still do not feel like I have completely understood it.

• After working with pens, I started using ink and brush as well. I think using them made it easier to create lines of varied thickness as well as bring a bit more confidence in my lines.

Day 5

• While working on representations of three-dimensional shapes by arrangement of lines and dots, I faced the same problem with balancing the actual form of the shape since it involves drawing shapes from different angles using perspective.

• After listening to some of the feedback given to my peers, I learned that warping the circular or square form of the dots at the edges or curves could help in expressing three-dimensionality better.

Day 6

• On this day I learned more about the mediums that we have been using in the past weeks.

• I believe that experimenting with texture and learning to control tone while using pencil, and similarly with thickness when using ink were the main objectives of that day.

• I struggled while dividing tones into 20 swatches using pencils. I think my main mistake was only using 3-2 grades of pencil and that too on the opposite ends of the scale of pencils grades (8B, 4B, HB). I should have used many pencils of different grades instead of rushing it with a few pencils.

• I think that dividing tones using ink was successful. I remember attempting something I had observed before in comics, where cross-hatching or dot patterns in ink would gradually come closer to each other or become thicker as tones became darker on a page.

DDD

• The daily drawing document went decently for the first week, however I made the mistake of slowly dropping out of routine as the theme became repetitive.

• I am noticing that dividing the ddd practice amongst just weekdays may not work for me.

• Practicing some pages out of the 50 during the weekends as well may lighten the daily load in the future.

Conclusion

• I struggled in finding a good balance at being unrestricted with my ideas yet keeping the essence of what it represents in arranging dots and other shapes to create a visual representation.

• Control of different mediums that have their own unique properties was made clear through practice.

• The concept of manipulating visual elements (lines, dots, squares, etc.) such as in size, thickness, tone, perspective was made clear through activities throughout the week as well.

• Though I received feedback from mentors that confused me at times, such as bringing more freedom and variation in composition while maintaining the form to be represented. Listening to others' feedback as well helped me figure out where I was stuck, for instance in 3D drawing during Day 5.

• In terms of engagement, I remember myself losing focus and feeling lethargic when working for extended hours at a go during class. I am hoping that I will eventually get a hang of putting more hours into work with better concentration.