Monday, May 16, 2011

Composing "Paved"

I fooled around with this post for too long, so it's a bit behind the times. Still, it's a good record of what goes into the creation of one of the framed reliefs.

Here's the initial Photoshop mock-up. By now I've learned that the piece is inevitably going to change a great deal when it meets the real world, so I'm when I'm working digitally I'm not trying to make a finished piece, so find a starting place, and get a sense of which pieces I need to make.



That said, I was sticking pretty close to the plan until I decided it wasn't really working.



So I ended up basically starting over. All those black spots are places where I've blacked out a hole I've made in the paper that I'll need to ignore when it comes time to drill out the template.







Still, I wasn't quite happy with it, so I started fooling around with the borders, cutting the ladies off at the top and making the whole thing a bit more claustrophobic. Then I decided that some of the "paving" pieces were too large, which led me to decide that many of the individual pieces needed to be fragmented, which necessitated an entire reconstruction of the lower section.



Compare the image above with the image below, with some details below.







A dance teacher once told me that things happen quickly on stage, so if you're composing a dance, and you've got a step you like, repeat it. The audience won't think it's a failure of imagination, they'll be grateful that they got to see that cool step again.

On a similar note, I was quite happy with this moment, where the skeleton intersects with Mad Meg in a negative space silhouette, so I decided to repeat it. Twice. Which led to a re-imagining of the top section, with skeletons floating all through the space.





The final object was changing right up to the last day. See the post above to see the piece in it's final incarnation.

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