Four Exercises

It’s been one month since I started Katie Pasquini Masopust’s online class, “Jumpstart your Creativity”. For our first class, we were tasked with making four different “sketches” that explored line and composition. Katie set parameters for each exercise: they each had to be done in a complementary color palette that had a light, medium and dark value. All four exercises were to be done with that color palette. Two of the compositions were to be done with straight lines, one with curved, and the last with a combination of the two. It was important that these were lines, not shapes. Backgrounds, too, had to have straight or curved lines.

Here are my four completed exercises:

There were 12 composition styles we could use. To keep myself honest, I picked them out of a hat. Can you guess which ones I used? Top row: grid and asymmetrical. Bottom row: triangle and framed.

I don’t really like the asymmetrical piece. It looks forced and that’s because it was. I had a very hard time figuring out how to make that composition. But I really like the other ones and they have given me some ideas which, I guess, is what this class is about.

This month we’re abstracting from a photograph. First step: picking a picture. I have too many choices on that front. 60,000+ choices. Egad.