Experi-paintings

Broadway Boogie Woogie - Mondrian

Inspired by the paintings of Mondrian, I decided to do some experi-paintings of my own. 

Mondrian's paintings are mainly compositions of lines, shapes and colours. It is hard to see his inspirations coming from real life, though I daresay most of them are. One painting that is known to be inspired by real life is the Broadway Boogie Woogie. This painting is Mondrian's interpretation of the city grid of Manhattan and the boogie woogie music to which he liked to dance. 

I decided to take some photographs of London and try and capture the essence of those images using only lines, circles and squares. Here are some of the results.

What I liked about these experiments is that even without the reference of the image, the result is makes an interesting composition. I do feel that even devoid of the colours and drastically simplified, the compositions do capture the essence of the photograhs. The next step would be, possibly, to add some colour. Will leave that for another sunny day :-)

Faking Depth

The introduction of gray to the BW palette conjures up a feeling of depth (while totally playing tricks on your eyes!). 

My experiment was to take 1 large black square, 1 large gray square, 1 small black square and 1 small gray square and moving them around a large white square. I created a basic composition with these squares :

Left : The squares of colours used for the experiment. Right : The basic composition that was the starting point.

So now, I started moving the squares around to see what happened. To my amusement, just by moving the larger squares (and not touching the smaller ones) I was able to create a few compositions where it seemed like I had moved all 4 squares (while I had moved only 2).

I really liked the one on the extreme RHS as it gives a really good feeling of depth. Also, I think, it was the one where one is least likely to believe that the small squares from the original composition were not touched.

p'A'per clip

Very impressed by Oded Ezer's work in general and this work with 3D typography in particular, I decided to experiment with 3D typography myself. It was quite simple really.... I took 2 paperclips and folded them into the letter 'A' in plan view. It was the elevations that were interesting......

 

Split Personalities

Being intrigued by the person that was Eric Gill, I decided to take a closer look at all the fonts that were designed by him. I thought his serif fonts were quite fantastic. From the quietly confident Perpetua, to the attention seeker - the Floriated Caps; I think Gill instilled strong personalities in his letter forms. 

Perpetua | Joanna | Gill Floriated Capitals

I thought it would be an amusing study to mix these 'personalities' and see what resulted from them. I decided to dissect the letters in half and then mix and match them to each other. What was really interesting to note, and what I learnt from this experiment, is that some important element of the letters always matched up to each other. It could be that the top of the cross bar aligned, or the peak coincided. These subtleties would not have been apparent by just looking at the letterforms in isolation.

Floriated Caps vs Jubilee

Perpetua vs Joanna

Joanna vs Floriated Caps

Jubilee vs Perpetua

Superhero Gill S

I had a lot of fun with this one. I made little placards of letters on trace paper so that I could overlay the different kinds and decide for myself which was the most interesting overlay. Came up with some really fun stuff which led to creation of completely new letters which I hope to use someday when I write my superhero Gill comic strip :-)

Analyze that : Getting somewhere

The various analysis diagrams got me addicted! I decided to keep going with the family of Gill Sans a bit more since there were both similarities and differences to map out. And the more I analyzed, the more I knew I was getting somewhere. Had no idea where yet, but was sure it was somewhere!

This exercise finally led me to a much better understanding of how a font family worked. What were those intrinsic qualities that made a letterform a part of a 'family' and what elements could be changed in it to make it either 'bold' or 'italic' without losing its essence.

Now I was analyzing with a wee bit more understanding.....

Simple Analysis by overlap

This one is quite simple. After trying out various different 'A's belonging to different typefaces, decided to do the same analysis with A's from the same font family. I decided to go for the font family of Gill Sans.
Figure 1. is achieved by folding the paper as shown in Fig.3 
I felt these analysis gave a really good sense of the volume of the letter.

Analysis Diagrams

This was basically an exercise in analytically studying the peak of an A. I took a few 'A's of varying shapes and sizes, cut them up along the base of their cross bar and studied the resultant top half. The images with the dots are not random! They are very careful and meticulous analysis of some point of the letterform with the chosen 'A's as my reference. The typefaces used were (L to R across rows from top LH corner) : Century Gothic, Optima, Helvetica, Impact, Bauhaus 93, Baskerville, Lucida Calligraphy Italic, Monotype Corsiva, Harrington, Eccentric Std, American Typewriter, Lucida Blackletter and Scriptina.

Choosing various 'A's. 

Chopping the letter to define the area between the peak and the base of the cross bar

Various analysis diagrams resulting from comparing different parameters of the letterform

(These were quite inspired after reading Tufte's Beautiful Evidence, especially 'Dotdashplot' and '3DScatterplot'

Experimenting with Analysis Diagrams

'A' in Arial, Times New Roman, Futura, Snell, Impact and Eccentric (L to R)

After analyzing the area that defined the peak of the letter 'A', I was left with a bunch of analysis diagrams that were albeit interesting to look at, but didn't translate to anything but, well, just interesting digrams!

It was only when I compared the different diagrams by laying them on top of one another that they started giving me information that I could interpret. With this thought in mind, I decided to conduct a simple experiment.

I took the letter 'A' in 6 different typefaces, Arial, Times New Roman, Futura, Snell, Impact and Eccentric. I drew them at 100 pt font size, at which they were more or less of comparable height.

Then I took the peak as I had defined in my previous post. I repeated some of the analysis and then layered the resultant diagrams on top of each other. The result was : one image formed by 6 layers of information. The information was interesting, but the resultant images were much more exciting for me!

Fig.1

 

Basically I took the height of a letters and made a square out of it (height of letter x height of letter = resultant square). I then layered the squares on top of each other in different ways creating different images.

Again I did the same kind of diagramming, but this time with squares that were created, were done using the widths of the letters instead of the heights. The resultant images, obviously similar in nature, were completely different in appearance.

Fig.2

By comparing Fig.1 and Fig.2 we could interpret a lot of information what would not be as apparent by just looking at the letters. For example, we can safely conclude that for letters ('A' in this case) of the same height, the widths a lot less varied than the heights. The 'A' for Impact and Times New Roman, has a significant difference in height, but the widths are almost the same. Such interpretations and conclusions kept me quite busy for a while!