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Angels,
& Demons, Art
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An Overview of Art Projects Angelic and Demonic in Nature and Experiences and Processes Thereof as recorded by
Hanna M. Raczek
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Introduction T T
Greetings. From this point forward you will encounter art projects from the year of A.D 2014 that represent the trials and triumphs of a battle that was won against all odds. The Designer’s War of 2014 in the classrooms of Intro to Design was a long and arduous conflict, waged against both angels and demons in quick succession. There was no respite. Now, for the first time, these beings have been gathered into one volume, detailing the moves and countermoves, wins and losses, natures and levels of hostilities of the opponents involved. Paper was shredded. Pencils destroyed. Photoshop files rewritten. Sleep lost by the hour. And many lessons learned. Lessons of being a follower of the the great Commander that is Art, rather than attempting to give orders when you have little authority to do so. Lessons of drawing--and adhering to--battle plans. Lessons of endurance, patience, courage, and strength. Art is a force of nature itself. To delve into its being and touch its fire is to become vulnerable and open to change. It demonstrates a willingness to risk battling its personality, which may turn angelic or demonic at a the slightest breath. It is a resolution to engage in both peaceful diplomacy and savage war. But, indeed, the war is always worth it.
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Table of Contents T
6 Abstraction Category 2 Demon: Gatekeeper of Hell
8 Expressive Text Category 1 Demon: Satan’s Wardrobe Supervisor 12 Object Iterations Choir 3 Angel: Patron Archangel of the Arts 14 Tutorial Choir 1 Angel: Lucifer before the Fall 18 Storybook Category 1 Demon: Lucifer after the Fall
Abstraction
We were required to pick four words from a list and design squares representing each. It was easy until we had to make them with only certain combinations of grey and black dots and lines. C2: Gatekeeper of Hell.
The dot-line project was awfully hard for me, as trying to represent the sense of a word--which is abstract in itself--with even more abstract arrangements of dots and lines didn’t sit with my brain very well. I struggled at first to urge my mind away from existing, understood symbols to convey my message, and to do this, I had to first conjur up emotion and subsequently translate that into visual language. The result was many similar iterations until I managed to break past that barrier, which is when I was finally able to come up with something new--in some cases, after the due date.
Here you see some of my brainstorming pages for three of my words. From above, clockwise: “Rejection”, “Oppression”, “Exhaustion”, and a page with narroweddown options after intial ideagenerating. In most cases, it took a few thumbnails to get to an idea worth persuing, and then it was a matter of creating variations. Others--like oppression--always followed an initial idea, in which case I jumped to the variationcreation. On the opposite page are displayed iterations of three of my four words, as the fourth was unable to be retrieved in time. Also shown is one of my brainstorming pages for redesigning the words “terror” and “oppression.” 6
“Terror”, shown here, did not convey the word as I’d hoped. The single dot amid vastness felt to me like terror closing in, with the dot vaguely resembling a contracted pupil. But this was difficult to communicate, and so I later decided to redesign it to the one to the immediate left, whch I felt better coveyed the chaos and loss of control that terror brings. For “rejection”, I toyed and eventually went along with the idea of being rejected by the world in general, a far more powerful emotion than simply being rejected by others. Placement was intentionally in the bottomleft, rather than right, because I wanted viewers to first see the dot, and then to see and appreciate the vastness of space pressing against it and shutting it in. I later improved it by placing a black dot on the other side of the line to better convey the word (it is easier to understand rejection from something rather than from something as abstract as the world). I chose this more obvious design for “oppression” (which I later reworked), since my immediate association was slow sufocation, helplessness, and a lack of escape. While it was relatively successful in its communication, I felt it lacked originality and risk, and, so, it was back to the drawing board (at far left). This is one of my planning sheets for redesigning some of my words. While I contemplated redesigning rejection (the bottom square), I realized that what I wanted was only a slight modification that didn’t need proper thumbnails, so it did not get several iterations. “Terror” and “oppression” did. I have already explained my terror redesign above, and oppression was redone so that it conveyed the “suffocation” aspect by being vaguely reminiscent of walls closing in from top and bottom. While perhaps it lost a bit of clarity of meaning, it was more original than my first, and I felt that this was more imporant to my development as a designer. Thus, it was a risk I was willling to take. 7
Expressive Text
Here we designed a chosen word four different times, aiming to explore the various ways in which it could be communicated and how this impacted its meaning. C1: Wardrobe supervisor.
“Tear” is a powerful word. It is not diffucult to feel it, but it was certainly difficult to express it. I began with many sketches, as most pieces of art, pencilling idea after idea in my sketchbook. At first, I simply sat drawing and redrawing fonts, as my mind was initially narrowed only to the idea of displaying text via letter manipulation; I couldn’t conceive of anything else, which brought frustration and the feeling of “hitting the wall” early on. But, slowly but surely, I pushed past the wall, and my mind expanded to the possibilities of displaying text via environment manipulation, or changing the format in which they were presented, rather than the letters themselves. As a result, none of my words were fonts. They were real. They were tangible. They finally spoke. This mind map was created in the first phases of brainstorming, exploring the connotations and associations with “tear”-which later brought about my final designs.
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With the word “tear�, I knew from the start that I wanted to evoke something disturbing, but sad. I wanted blood. With some green paper, inky hands, an old door on the street, and some Photoshop magic, I gave my word frightening substance. Initial photographs before merging
Two of several iterations in Photoshop.
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It all began with a hand. After an experimental run with my own and a bottle of ink, I repeated the process on my friends to form the letters you see below. We tried several different letter forms and hand combinations, and I chose the best out of these. Mixed capital and lowercase letters seemed clunky; all lowercase seemed understated. Here we found a balance.
I attempted to make this iteration convey a sense of brokenness between people, but of unity in the face of it. We are all people with blood on our hands, and while humanity is torn apart, we are also drawn together through our shared blood, sweat, and tears. Opposite, you can see this dark, sad, and sometimes violent theme threading through all of my final iterations.
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Object Iterations
This project required us to choose a single object and create it in multiple ways and media, in order to be able to communicate its essence in various styles. Ch3: Patron of the Arts.
Initially floundering on what to choose as my object, I eventually settled on the flamingo, seeing as I had had experience with drawing them prior to this class and, frankly, my roommate loved them. It was a challenge, however, to diversify my imaginings of a flamingo--to explore different poses, techniques, and interpretations of what “flamingo” might be. The contour drawing was the most difficult--how do you make something so rough and imperfect artistic? Surprisingly, imitating the artists wasn’t difficult at all; I chose Saul Bass, whose style greatly inspired me, and Van Gogh, whose painting techniques inspired millions.
Contour drawings, by their very nature, are diffucult and imperfect. Above you see my practice with the style, as well as my first (and, suprisingly, only) contour iteration of a flamingo and its Photoshopped counterpart. I had imagined soft, but distict, shadows painted on the line drawing, but, as per usual, the work chose its own path and became psudo-watercolor. Also as per usual, I didn’t mind a bit.
After the contour drawings came actual, conscious design, a process which certainly tested my abilites, however small. The numerous iterations I did-some of which are shown at left--were meant to get at the essence of my object and to learn to capture only what was absolutely necessary. As you can see, I began with full bodies, then halfbodies, and, finally, no-bodies, as I had come to learn that to recognize a flamingo, one need only to see the beak and, pehaps, the neck. This realization later influenced several of my iterations, some of which were refined from these very sketches.
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Saul Bass’s work was bold and unafraid, embracing something as feared as imperfection. Imitating his style posed little problem, as it was simply geometric with few colors.
Above is the original painting on sketchbook paper. At right is the digitally edited, final iteration.
I began with a sketch that became my base. After outlining background squares on another sheet of paper, I cut out the pieces of the first, traced them on the background, and painted them. I then scanned and reworked it in Photoshop to even out the colors and do some repositioning.
Here you see my “stained glass” flamingo, though that is not what it was intended to be! I had begun with a simple vision of slightly overlapping geometric shapes coming together to form a flamingo, first sketching them on paper and placing them digitally in Photoshop. As most pieces go, it went in its own direction, and I dutifully followed.
As with Saul Bass, Van Gogh was simple to imitate in that I knew both what to do and how to do it, since his style was so very distinct. As shown, however, execution, at first, was sorely lacking. After practicing and becoming slowly frustrated, I began on my final “draft”, being much more careful and precise. When it was finished, I digitally cleaned it up.
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Tutorial
For this project, we wrote and designed a tutorial with the goal of communicating important information clearly and concisely, while also experimenting with effective typography and composition. Ch1: Lucifer before he Fell.
Somewhat unconventionally, I took my tutorial inspiration from one of my favorite T.V. shows, Avatar: The Last Airbender, which is rooted in traditional Asian cultures--most notebably borrowing martial arts, which form the foundation of the show’s “bending” forms, or ways of controlling the elements of earth, fire, water, and air. For this project, I did a tutorial demonstrating a waterbending form, presenting it in a style that mimics both that of the show and of East Asia.
To the right are my original and only sketches of the forms I would later recreate with ink. They were intentionally rough; I didn’t need perfection, as I simply needed a reference, rather than a line drawing. I took inspiration from similar artistic works I found on online art communites.
Referenced from the series’ own use of Chinese charcters, I found the ones I needed--taken from a canon “waterbending scroll”--and reproduced them with brush and ink. The above line (appearing sideways) translates to “single water whip”, and the one below translates to “water is benevolent”.
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Brushstrokes conveyed fluidity and continuity, the essence of water. After many trial runs and failed attempts (iterations which were so unwisely discarded, which, alas, cannot be retreived), I settled on four final forms, two of which are shown here--before and after digital editing.
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Seamlessly combining the tutorial I had written and the artwork I had created was a diffucult task. Before I had begun the digital portion of my project, my vision was to have the tutorial laid out like a bending scroll from the show, with few written instructions and a straight, horizontal line of forms. I soon realized that this would not work with the paper’s ratio of width-toheight--it would have had to be thinner--and, so, I had to scrap that idea and begin planning my layout from scratch. After a large amount of rearranging and head-scratching, I eventually came up with the initial draft, shown at left. I soon edited it, moving the title to the top and thinning the body columns for clarity, while rearranging and resizing the images to improve the visual hirearchy. After a series of improvements, my final draft, shown opposite, included a textured background and hand-drawn lettering.
To the right are my title words that I created with brush and ink, later used for my final iteration. Unlike my other artwork, they were drawn spontaneously and without references.
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by Hanna Raczek
With feet shoulderwidth apart, raise a moderately-sized sphere of water to chest height. Feel the strength of the bond with your element. Keep tension. Speed will be required, and the connection cannot break.
Smoothly rock your hands slightly to the right, gradually widening the space between them. Notice how the water follows, stretching as it accelerates towards your hands. Keep your palms facing the intended path as you push and pull it.
Increase your momentum and direct it to the left, allowing it to flow from your fingers. Turn your left foot towards your target, straightening your right leg and keeping your right foot anchored. Guide the whip through your arms and end with a sharp snap. Your arms and left foot should finish pointing left.
Transfer your momentum back towards the left by turning your hands, leading with your right, and taking a small step in the same direction. Increase your speed. Focus on keeping your movements fluid, though filled with energy.
Storybook
This was a collaboration with elementary education majors who wrote the text for their designers. We were then charged with illustrating and designing the book itself. C3: Lucifer after he Fell.
Being given paragraphs of words with the deceptively simple job of bringing them to life is a daunting task, and even more so when the words you receive are less than ideal. Struggling through the task of illustration--and, even more problematic, the decision of what to illustrate in the first place--required a large portion of brainstorming and self-control. There was a hefty measure of frustration, as well, as my story was incredibly long, creating arduous work. A hard lesson learned was that putting everything together is less about completing the puzzle, and more about fitting together the pieces that will give the most complete picture. The first task was to discard the author’s page breaks and impose my own, separating the text in a manner that was both logical and, in the long run, manageable. Faced with a mountain of text, I carefully went through and marked my own page breaks, later using them to create thumbnails. I roughly outlined my initial ideas of illustrations and text placement; however, I soon learned a very important lesson, which I wrote in my sketchbook:
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Keeping this important message to myself in mind, I narrowed my illustrations down to a moderate sum of animals and various things in nature, and my background to, for the most part, a single image. For all images, barring backgrounds, I penciled the simple outlines in my sketchbook and digitally colored and textured them.
ammy was very thankful that all the animals he had encountered were friendly to him, but he was very frustrated. All he wanted was to be at home with his family. He decided he was going to go into a nearby woods to see if any of the woodland creatures would be able to lead him back to the Lewis house.
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While in the forest, Sammy came across a raccoon named Rascal and a skunk named Stella. Neither of them could tell Sammy where the Lewis family lived, but directed him to a tortoise named Ted, who lived just outside of the woods. Sammy confronted the tortoise.
“Good evening, Ted. I’m Sammy! My friends Rascal and Stella told me you may be able to tell me where Kaden and Kyla Lewis live.” “Why hello, Sammy! I’ve always wanted to meet a Dalmatian. If I knew where they lived, I would take you there as soon as I could, but I am unaware where those people live.” As Sammy was leaving the forest, he heard a rustling in the woods. It happened to be a squirrel. He thought to himself, why not ask this little animal if he could direct him home. Sammy would do anything to be back with the Lewis family. He met Unity the squirrel, but she wasn’t able to help him find his way home, either.
As the young Dalmatian was walking on the edge of the woods, he noticed a vulture sitting on the side of the street, and pondered if he should ask the vulture if he knew how to find the Lewis house. He approached the vulture saying, “Hello, my name is Sammy, is it possible that you know who the Lewis family is?” “Hi Sammy, I’m Vanessa. I can say I’ve flown over their house a few times, but I do not know where they actually live. I’m sorry I couldn’t’ assist you.”
The young Dalmatian was about to leave the woods when he heard a rustling in the bushes nearby. He decided to wander and see if it was another animal that could happen. As he wandered more, he found that it was a wolf. He immediately ran for the street, but then heard the wolf murmur,
Still, I struggled to de-clutter and simplify. My test spread, while certainly an improvement from the thumbnail days, lacked order and heirarchy while being unecessarily filled with “stuff”, seen at left.
“Come back! Is there something that I can help you with?”
ammy was very thankful that all the animals she had encountered were friendly to her, but she was very frustrated. All she wanted was to be at home with her family. S She decided she was going to go into a nearby woods to see if any of the woodland
“Yes… Yes there is. Is it possible that you may know where the Lewis family lives?”
creatures would be able to lead her back to the Lewis house. While in the forest, Sammy came across a raccoon named Rascal and a skunk named Stella. Neither of them could tell Sammy where the Lewis family lived, but they directed her to a tortoise named Ted, who lived just outside of the woods. Sammy confronted the tortoise. “Good evening, Ted. I’m Sammy! My friends Rascal and Stella told me you may be able to tell me where Kaden and Kyla Lewis live.” “Why hello, Sammy! I’ve always wanted to meet a Dalmatian. If I knew where they lived, I would take you there as soon as I could, but I am unaware of where those people live.”
“First, let me introduce myself. My name is Wanda. Unfortunately, I do not know where the Lewis family lives, but it was very nice to meet you!”
As Sammy was leaving the forest, she heard a rustling in the woods. It happened to be a squirrel. She thought to herself, why not ask this little animal if she could direct her home? Sammy would do anything to be back with the Lewis family. She met Unity the squirrel, but she wasn’t able to help her find her way home, either.
Revisions brought much-needed breathing room and a softer presentation, allowing both illustrations and text proper focus. The pictures were now existing harmoniously with the text, rather than competing with it, shown at right.
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s the young Dalmatian was walking on the edge of the woods, she noticed a vulture sitting on the side of the street, and she pondered if she should ask the vulture if A she knew how to find the Lewis house. She approached the vulture saying,
“Hello, my name is Sammy. Is it possible that you know who the Lewis family is?” “Hi Sammy, I’m Vanessa. I can say I’ve flown over their house a few times, but I do not know where they actually live. I’m sorry I couldn’t assist you.” The young Dalmatian was about to leave the woods when she heard a rustling in the bushes nearby. She decided to wander and see if it was another animal that could help her. As she wandered more, she found that it was a wolf. She immediately ran for the street, but then she heard the wolf murmur, “Come back! Is there something that I can help you with?” “Yes… Yes there is. Is it possible that you may know where the Lewis family lives?” “First, let me introduce myself. My name is Wanda. Unfortunately, I do not know where the Lewis family lives, but it was very nice to meet you!”
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This process book was designed, printed, and bound at St. Norbert College in De Pere, WI in November-December of 2014. Headings are typeset in Olho de Boi and body in Seravek. All work is original, completed in a variety of media including acrylic, charcoal, pencil, and ink. Backgrounds were digitally created.
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