Drawing440: Text Project

For this Project the objective was to create a drawing using text as the driving point for our finished piece of work. We were shown some examples or artists work, but one artist that stuck out to me was Ed Ruscha. We watched a video about him, and how he created art and I found him to be very interesting and a genius. One part of the video that stuck out in my mind was when he was creating text out of unconventional materials. He used materials like ketchup, chocolate, chewing tobacco, the list goes on. I liked this idea of creating text that was not just ink, or something that had been seen again and again. That's when I decided "I think I want to make my words out of smoke/ fire".Now that I had what material I wanted to use down, I had to come up with some text. This was a little bit of a struggle for me because I'm not typically a huge text fan, I prefer more imagery. One day in class I started thinking about dogs and how awesome they are...and then I wrote down the word DOG. Then I wrote DOG backwards seeing that it says GOD. I was playing around this for a little bit, and in my mind this made sense because dogs are literally so awesome they're like little pieces of God sent down here on earth to make us happy. So took my and started playing around with it in illustrator. I flipped some of the letters rotated a few, until I finally came up with two designs that I liked. One was more in the shape of a rectangle, and the other in a diamond. I was pretty stuck between those when prof. Brent suggested playing with the size of these shapes made of of letters, possibly having some letters continue off the page. I liked how this turned out so thats the final design I settled on. the next step was to create my stencil. I would create a stencil the same size as the paper we were given (22x30) and cut of the letters of one, then place it on top of the other so that I could get the smokey effect (fumage)  that I desired on my letters. After drawing all of my letters on my paper I then cut them out with an x-acto knife. This process was pretty tedious because I wanted my letters to be pretty crisp and clean. Then I also ran into the problem of what to do with the centers of certain letters like the O's and the D's because they centers cannot just float there in the air. I decided to temporarily tape them in, so I knew exactly which center belonged to what letter. After getting my stencil complete it was time to put it on top of my actual paper. todo this I used lots and lots of masking tape. I wanted it as flush as possible with the main paper so that when I fumaged everything it created nice crisp letters. After getting everything taped down I went in and removed the temporary tape holding the centers of the letters in place. The next step was the most important: the fumage-ing. To fumage what you do is basically hold your paper above yourself in the air, and put a flame underneath it. The flame produces smoke which the paper then catches creating the smoky effect. This process is a little tricky especially when you're trying to hold your paper up and simultaneously holding a stick of fire in your hand while trying to not catch yourself and/or the paper on fire. Thankfully I had some practice with this mark making, as I had done it before in Drawing 230 with Mike Nichols.For the source of my fire I used a simple stick candle, and a tiki torch (the torch creates bigger flames). I thought my process went pretty smoothly and the only issues I really experienced were trouble with the wind, and when I got to close to the edge of my paper it would catch flame every now and then, but I kinda liked the effect it gave. My final step of this process was peeling my stencil off and hoping for good results. I was very pleased once I got everything peeled off, and pretty proud of myself for executing what I had set out to do. In critique the comments I had related to possibly making more of my edges burnt so they don't look like mistakes. However I think its kind of interesting to leave them there displaying that they could possibly be mistakes, and in one wrong turn I could've gone up in flames like my paper because fire is not something typically you play with and can be dangerous.