Assignment #2 and #4: Chair Pattern and Quadrant Abstraction

I chose the Sheraton design out of the four chairs we could pick from. My approach was to shift the design into more of an outdoor furniture kind of look. I did this by getting rid of the embellishments in the arms and legs of the chair for something more simple. I also changed the design for the back of the chair to something with a more supportive back. I drew four perspectives of the chair instead of three because I honestly found designing something without an exact reference quite difficult and felt that it would help me figure out how to draw the chair more easily.

Frontal View

 

Posterior View

Top View

Side View

After presenting the drawings in class we were assigned a quadrant to put on one of our drawings. I was assigned Quadrant D and chose the Top View because I found the shape to be the most likely to resemble something that wasn't a chair. 

 First I started out with a sketch of what was in the quadrant so I could get an isolated view of what I was going to be referencing my piece from.

 This really wasn't enough for me to go off of so I went back to my source material and thought about it. The chairs I designed were for outdoor use so that made me think of the outdoors as well as how art can be public. This made me think of my Art History class because we just went over Egyptian obelisks, more specifically Cleopatra's Needle that currently resides in New York City. So I decided that I wanted my piece to be about the relationship between ornament and outdoor/public art. Essentially how we use design and ornament in things for everyone to see.

I explored that idea through several thumbnails in my sketchbook and didn't really get further on how to reference an obelisk in my piece. So I moved on to focus a little more on the nature aspect of outdoor design. That resulted in a small sketch where I attempted to create trees using the geometrical design I had from my quadrant. I quickly moved on from the idea because I have done a geometric landscape series before and I wanted to try something more ambitious.

I remembered that I probably should convey the idea of sitting in the piece as well. Looking back at my quadrant I thought the image could look like an unorthodox fence, but the arc didn't quite fit. So I thought perhaps it could be a tail and started to draw a few thumbnails of a horse by a fence. I didn't want the focus to be on the horse so in these drawings, I put the focus on the tail and the fence. To reference the color palette of the chair I used brown and red. 

I decided on the second thumbnail because I felt it would be the most visually interesting and challenging to draw. I had never drawn a horse before, especially from such a strange angle.

 I started with the fence and put it off center so the composition wouldn't be centered and placed the horse adjacent to it so the curved arc would be near it in a similar fashion to my quadrant.

After rendering the horse I felt that the loose marks I had made in my original thumbnail would have been too sloppy so I decided grass would be better for the composition. I wanted to leave the area with the arc and the fence without grass so the focus would be drawn to the elements of our quadrant we were assigned to convey so I left the grass towards the borders of the page despite feeling like that space was a little empty.