Line Meets Meaning

A line can become more than meets the eye. The single act of composing a line with a purpose behind it can give it meaning. I have begun experimenting and illustrating interesting line work in my Design Foundations course. The assignment is called "Line Meets Meaning."

The five by five inch squares that I am creating were cut from a Bristol paper book. I pasted them on top of thick black cardstock for a nice contrast. We were to only use black, white and the in between shades. Because my handwriting is not perfect, I used an interesting set of stickers that appeared like they were typed on an old typewriter.

Loneliness was depicted as a psychedelic cavernous space. As you get deeper in, the darker it gets. Nervous as depicted like random brush-strokes of different lengths and widths. I did this to convey the feeling of different thoughts colliding when a person is nervous. Medium matters in this assignment and you can use this to your advantage.

Overall, this assignment was a great start to the course. I now understand that even the direction of a line can give it energy, make it stable (or unstable), and affect the meaning of the composition. There were six other words, and I hope to make future blog posts about them. Think about this next time you are designing something or drawing: lines can be strategically composed to mean something bigger or evoke emotion.