Shape Project Critique Assessment

Unfortunately the best photo I could get of my second 2D Design project was with my camera phone just before I turned it in the be graded. Not the best picture. I assure you it looks better in person.

This project was a shape-based project. We had to pick two adjectives and create a triptych based on the merging on those two adjectives. We started out with a list of something like 10 adjectives which we narrowed down over a few classes to the two we ended up working with. My final words were violent and wavy.

For my written critique (from other students) I got:

Good: flow & shape of design
Bad: transition kind of weird, look good separately.
Change: less negative space in 1st 2.

I'm supposed to critique my critique. Allow me to mention that we had something like 15 minutes to write these things. I think whoever did mine was feeling lazy. I by no means think my piece is perfect. There are a few things I'd change, like:

01. Adding another white bit at the bottom of the middle one.
02. Adding a few more knife-shaped bits on the first panel.

I personally don't think there's anything wrong with my transition. It was ridiculously hard to do considering it was made of cut paper. I mean, how do you think I got all my pieces to fit together so perfectly? Let me tell you, it wasn't by magic. And as far as the comment on the white space; triptychs aren't supposed to be viewed one panel at a time. I purposely placed everything the way I did for an overall aesthetically pleasing wave shape.

Here is the sketch of my original idea and some of my other ideas for the project.

Line Project Critiques

Our first project for 2D Design dealt with line. Here are a couple of my preliminary sketches for the assignment.



Here is my final piece (cleaned up in photoshop for improved viewing purposes). As you can see it's basically an edited version of my second idea.

I used a range of curved and straight lines of varying intensity to fill the space. The fluidity of the curved lines create a tension with the grouped straight lines and I feel like this piece completely fulfills the guidelines for the project. It's weakness, I'll be the first to admit, is in the execution. You can't tell from the photo, but this piece is enormous. And drawing clean, curved lines that are that long is VERY difficult. I utilized both india ink applied with a brush and micron pens to create the lines.

The lines themselves could have had a little more variance in boldness. Up close it looks fine, but from farther off it looks a bit skeletal and unfinished. I personally don't have a HUGE problem with that aspect, but it was brought to my attention in critique several times.

This was by far the piece receiving the most positive feedback. It's use of line was unique and definitely made it stand apart from the other projects. It was executed beautifully with excellent craftsmanship. What stands out to me was that it utilized the type of free, squiggly, thin lines that make up hair in a way that separates it from it's original context.


This is the piece that stood out to me as being somewhat weak, not so much dealing with craftsmanship or execution, but due to the fact that I hardly think this piece is about line. Yes, it is COMPOSED of lines, but so is Micky Mouse and you could hardly call either a work that speaks on line as an element of design particularly. It deals so much with shape and depth, I don't think it fulfills the requirements of the assignment.

Otherwise I also feel it suffers slightly from the same problem as my own piece. It's a bit, skeletal and gives the impression of being unfinished... like that of a coloring book.