Book Binding - Perfect Bind

The book wot i did make in this workshop

I was feeling vibrant, hence the in your face colour scheme. Works well though i think.

What is a Line?

"A connected series of events, actions, or developmetns."

Well... i began by just typing 'line' into google to see what hits i got. I found myself on a strange string of thoughts which kept me sifting through google and the depths of the seemingly random things people have been doing with their time. Here it goes.

I typed 'line' into google and this was the first image that grabbed my attention. My initial reaction was hah! that's funny that someone has taken the time to do this. Then i thought about how it was interesting for the reason that the line avoided being broken.

So for my next search i typed in 'Broken Line' which go the hit Broken Line - Photographs by Olaf Otto Becker.

Written By Publisher

"Olaf Otto Becker, born in 1959, worked for almost four years and covered thousands of miles by boat creating these photographs of the Greenlandic coastline. The resulting images, made in the clear light of the midsummer night over long exposures, are worth the effort. Almost shadowless neo-romantic dreams capes, they are unrealistically beautiful. Becker sometimes waits days for the right image or condition to appear in order to produce a single image-a process that leaves him with only about 25 photographs per year. Though visually diverse, all of the pictures share the contemplative character of their creator. Becker, who was once a painter, doesn't photograph scenery: He builds compositions, using his eye and his patience to develop a work of melancholic beauty, in the powerful iconography of the nineteenth-century landscape. He has exhibited widely in Europe, and his previous monograph was short-listed for the Rencontres D'Arles Book Award."

I really like these photographs, they are very calm and glass like. Such a sharp image for such a long exposure gives an out of this world perspective on the terrain. I thought about why it was called broken line, instead of reading into it. I came up with the idea that the line was his journey around the Greenlandic coastline which was broken up into single moments in time or single images in the vast space of the bigger picture.

Also thinking about books i like the simplicity of it. I think it is the margin spacing which makes it look so neat.Another result i got from 'broken line' was these ink paintings/drawings byJulian Cox. I like the sway he has turned the complexity of the human form into a collection of very simple lines. Just using the thickness and density of the lines so convey form and shape.

Along with the hits for 'broken lines' i also found this image which was titled dissecting lines. I don't know who took this photograph unfortunately. But it reminded me of vapour trails in the sky and how they overlapped in smooth graceful curves.

So i typed it in and found these beautiful photographs of which there are many more.

I just love the way the curves are so gentle and graceful. It seems so serene in these photos. Also when you look up and see a plane high up in the sky on a clear day, you cannot hear the sound but you see the vapour trail or contrail and i find it very relaxing.. Brief wiki explanation "Contrails or vapour trails are visible trails of condensed water vapour made by the exhaust of aircraft engines. As the hot exhaust gases cool in the surrounding air they may precipitate a cloud of microscopic water droplets. If the air is cold enough, this trail will comprise tiny ice ."

This led me on to thinking about vapour trails of comets, however there were few interesting images of it, but i stumbled over this photo which is actually quite interesting to me. I cannot explain in my own words so I'll let a fella called Stuart explain what is going on here.

I had just got on my bicycle to go home from work when I saw a pretty amazing sight in the sky. Luckily I wasn't going fast, so I managed to stop before I went into a nearby hedge. There was the Moon in the east with Mars about 20 degrees or so away around to the right. Near Mars was something that looked a bit like a curved vapour trail. Looking more carefully I realised that it made a full loop of the Moon. This was no vapour trail but a Moon halo. Just as rainbows are caused when light from the Sun is refracted by raindrops, crystals of ice high up in the atmosphere can refract moonlight to create bows and dogs. Whereas rainbows require raindrops in front of you and the Sun behind your head, halos are seen in 22° arcs around a bright object such as the Sun or around the almost full Moon whenever there are hazy cirrus clouds about. As the light is refracted, different colours are bent through different angles just as in a prism. Although this happens with a Moon halo, the light is very weak so is difficult to pick up by eye. Hopefully, in the image above you can see the colours. Frankly, I am amazed that this came out on my camera.

What a lovely story.

But i did find this interesting, the idea of a perfectly spherical line in space so i used that for my next key words.

This is the only interesting result i found in pages and pages of google and blogs. All the rest were of line graphs and boring things like that. Line in Space... i thought about the implications of this image, what space was and what these lines were. An image sprung to mind of a clear perspex box with thread pulled tightly across the interior of it, creating a crazy net within the box like the image below.

I think all this will give me something to go on thinking about for a while.

I suppose what I've done, without really thinking about it is "a connected series of events, actions or developments." This could apply to any research or developmental stage of designing in a way.

Also my last idea about A line in Space ties in with "a mark indicating position, connection or boundaries" like a map a journey or a series of events.

Next I Shall... OUGD102

..gather some materials to start exploring the aesthetics of a motorbike to glamorise it.

>Toy Motorbike, preferably air-fix.

>Motor Oil
>Parts of the bike/small components to experiment with media.

I think it would be fun just to have a toy bike to play with and see what comes of it. I have had the idea of running a bike through some motor oil to see if the tyre tracks are imprinted on a variety of materials. I have gathered foam board, felt, different grades of paper and card. I have also got hold of some electrical components which will have to substitute for the motorbike parts for now. This is simply so i can experiment with mark making. Perhaps scanning, tracing, overlaying, imprinting in plaster scene, or even developing the negative of the parts in the dark room.

I think this next week will bring about some great results which i can pin down and take to the next design stage.

...

This is an instruction page for assembling a model spitfire. Thanks Adam for this, its really cool i like the layout as well, its really simple and clear. I have actually just been out and bought an air-fix model of a motorbike so this could be some really great development work now.

100 Inital Book OUGD102

...

Initial hand drawn sketched and traces of the motobike parts

Visual Language Session2

Pictograms, icons and Signs

Our second session of visual language this term was about instructional design and using simple visual signs and icons to inform or narrate a series of events.

Our task was to create a sequence of events as a narrative, then select 10-12 key points of the narrative, then narrow it down again to 6-8 concise/detailed bullet points which we would then visualize as pictograms.

I thought this would be quite a simple task but i turned out i was wrong...

Firstly i started over drawing my images which turned into illustrations instead of simple icons. The idea, is it should work regardless of scale. However i got the hang of it toward the end of the session and would like to finish off my narrative, or start over again after looking at some books.

Writing from 30.3.09 - again more of this has been done. I have done a nice little step by step narrative of how to make a cup of tea. I didn't challenge myself in the drawing to be honest but i have grasped the idea of not having to draw as an illustration, framing, cropping, editing and modifying are really important when doing iconography and symbolism.

In the session before this we were each given a word. Mine was 'Briefcase'. The brief was to create 30 thumbnail ideas considering how we could represent a 'briefcase' without using anything which didn't transcend languages; i.e. type or words, as they cannot be understood around the world.

Visual Language Session1

Perspective Drawing

For this session we were learning how to draw 2 point perspective shapes perfectly accurately. It is something i have done before but it is always to get in more practice and move my drawing ability forward.

We began by creating a perfect cube, which is something you have to get used to looking at, as it can be deceptive. After we had the cube sorted out we moved onto a perspective grid system, which was made up of cubes also, but it involved plotting diagonal interacting lines to work out the proportions correctly.

Once we had done that the challenge was to write your initials in perspective. Here it is...

writing from 30.3.09 - since then i have done a few more letter form drawings and also some drawings of buildings looking at shading in particular.

Basic Binding and Paper Crafting OUGD102

I made up a few maquettes to see what kind of form my book might take. These maquettes are based on templates found in my templates sourcebook.