Officine Rossopuro 'Big Red'

Starting to sketch in a sketchbook that has grey paper. It's amazing how dynamic the picture can become once you dabble some white on the page. Also, for some reason, I feel like I learn something new every time I sketch. Creating this sketch revealed to me how clean and beautiful lines look if you get them right on the first two tries especially if you apply them with enough weight that they stand out without needing to go over them again. It's crazy but having a line that is off by a quarter of a millimeter or waves off of a straight line by the tiniest amount can really be the difference between having the sketch be perceived as a tight clean sketch versus a quick "whatever" sketch. I think the goal of all this sketching is to not only hopefully tear it up in Viscom4 when I get there, but to truly understand the expression of form. Not sure if I mentioned that before but I'm excited for the possibilities that lay ahead. (Tearing it up in Viscom4 would be pretty satisfying as is though).

Back to Ballpoint

Product2 midterms are done now. These past few days made for another crazy week. I learned the importance of transitioning to 3D sooner in the design process, or at least when it is necessary to determine if something will actually work. Sketching is appropriate for certain things, when expressing ideas or giving a sense of how something WILL work. But when it comes down to executing a design in order to move forward in the deBacsign process and bring the product to fruition, it is vital to start building even if what you are making is not necessarily completely refined or thought through. Working in 3D reveals possibilities that sketching sometimes will not, and ideas will spawn from just holding a study model in your hands or pushing a mock-up around.

Anyway, this coming week I need to create tubing and a pathway for my push/pull toy. These are some sketches of forms that I did in class using ballpoint. It's been a while since I used ballpoint but this page really reminded me how fun it is as a medium. I initially stopped using it because you can't marker over it but now that I am depending on lines for values, I'm not really using marker's to render too much. That is on the list of things to become good at though so, maybe I'll start marker rendering in the near future. Despite what I said about 3D building, sketching of course remains the most efficient way to express, create, and sift through ideas. At the beginning of Product2 this term, I discovered how sketching forms on a page without necessarily any clear concrete direction can lead to other ideas.