Seeing as the symbol project required 9 different base factors, I spent a lot of time at first just coming up with the photos and drawings that I needed to trace, not to mention the actual tracing part on the computer, where I had to put in a little extra time to make sure there were no kinks that could lead to problems later. After that, I spent a really long time coming up with combinations, especially with the idea of integration between symbols in mind. I think here is definitely where I spent the most time, and perhaps it wasn’t enough to truly integrate a lot of my ideas, but I definitely got more comfortable cutting apart my symbols during this time. Unfortunately I can’t boast constant work put into my symbols, as might be pointed out when I forgot to fill in my photo tracings, but I put a pretty significant amount of time into my integrated symbols and their iterations.
Sophistication of my work came the easiest, especially since I’m usually pretty nit-picky, with my work more so than anyone else’s. I spent a lot of time smoothing out the connecting areas, especially in the shark’s tail and its varying degrees of thickness due to ‘unite’ defaults. The turtle’s shell also took a lot of time to get right, and I had to put in a lot of work just uniting and ungrouping, and then tweaking, and then uniting, and then inversing again and again to get the end result. In the end there was a lot of work making sure that all of my symbols fit into one cohesive whole, which was pretty difficult with my widespread/bycatch symbol, since it was made up of so much false negative space and separate ovals. All of the time really contributed to the solidity of my symbols, the balance, the simplicity, and the technical work that was the criteria for the project, and so I feel as if I got pretty sophisticated results.
A lot of the feedback that I got from other students was pretty spot on: a lot of them suggested that I thicken or thin up lines, especially in my shark’s tail and in my turtle’s shell. I think the biggest contribution I got from everyone though was how much they really liked my combination of ‘widespread’ and ‘bycatch’ symbols (the alien head). If multiple people hadn’t pointed out how weird it looked and how much they liked it, I probably would have dismissed it. I’m really glad I took everyone’s advice though, because it really helped me focus on how I could make that symbol in particular a lot better.
The biggest challenge I think I faced was trying to integrate two symbols into one seamless whole. My default reaction is definitely a lot more like the “default design” that anyone can do with a couple of clicks in Illustrator. So when it was pointed out to me that a lot of my symbols were just two things put next to each other, it was challenging to think of them in any other way. I’m not entirely sure how well I was able to resolve a lot of it, so while the challenge level was intense, I feel as if I wasn’t able to fully rise up to it, partly due to lack of continuous work, and partly because of lack of time.
I’m not entirely sure what other expert experiences is supposed to mean, so I just interpreted it as the amount of playing around and experimenting within Illustrator to get different results with my symbols. I would probably classify my expert experiences as somewhere in the middle range, since I did a lot of playing around with pathfinder and ‘divide below’, as well as with shape-maker and the pen tool. So while I feel as if I have a pretty good grasp of those tools now, I admittedly might not have gone as far as I could have with a bunch of other tools, and so my other ‘expert experiences’ were limited.
I would like to think that this project, in addition to all of the others that I’ve had throughout my freshman year, has contributed to a more mature social emotional development by forcing me to stop thinking of all of my work as precious. It also helped to remind myself that any comments made against the direction I wanted to go with a symbol was not a commentary against me as a person, and was only directed at my work as a suggestion. I think having a more mature outlook on critiques helped me to take more people’s advice and suggestions and apply them more efficiently to my work to help better it. I also just had to be more mature in order to fit in the time to work on this project, which took a lot of discipline to get it done along with all of the hours it took to work on my other big class, printmaking.
I would like to argue that I contributed to a fairly warm classroom climate. Have I been a little grumpy at times during class? Yes. But I generally hate to just tear people down, so I really worked at consciously looking at people’s designs and ideas in ways to make them better, with the direction of their personal projects in mind. I think that I definitely responded best to the people who were really enthusiastic about their work though, and so it was really hard to help those people who clearly were just inventing up topics to get through the project. But overall, I think I gave fair feedback, and wasn’t a person that drags the whole climate down.