A Reminiscer's Walk

On Tuesday, my husband, one of my daughters, and I drove to my parent’s home in Hacienda Heights, California to help them while my father is staying in Baldwin Park Hospital. He has dipped into a fog and can have bouts of confusion, thinking he is in a play (he used to be a high school drama teacher) but in most ways he is still his same self and sometimes recollects lovely memories from his life. I am sitting next to his bed as I write this.

The home that my parents currently live in is the home I lived in from ages eight to sixteen. This home is marked with the number 1 on the map and will be called, my old home. There is another home that is 1.3 miles away that was the home we all lived in when I was three to eight years old. This one is marked number 8 on the map and will be called, my older home. Wednesday morning I took this walk with the eye of a reminiscer.

Along my walk I snapped photos and later drew in my memories in blue. Number 2 on the map marks where Marie Luna and I played Barbies for the last time near her parent’s front yard fountain.

Number 3 on the map marks where I would stop and peek through the fence to see the white llama that resided there. This time I could only see a white truck.

Number 4 on the map marks where the tall metal space ship used to be. I wonder how tall it really was because it seemed like a skyscraper at the time. It even had a captain’s steering wheel and escape slide. My sister and I would stand in the top, grip the bars, and shake as hard as we could to get the ship to rock back and forth. There was also a 1960’s looking concrete sculpture that we would pretend was the moon. Now the park has a playground with newer, safer equipment.

At this same park there was a building with a many arched roof that my brother somehow got on top of. For a while I watched in envy as he ran back and forth over those arches until all of the sudden, basketballs, pink plastic balls, tennis balls, and a volleyball came raining down. He kicked an accumulation of many years worth off the roof. Sweet manna from heaven, I felt like we had won the lottery.

Number 6 on the map is the very memorable tall curb I had to climb up every day I walked to school. Today it goes up to my knees.

Number 7 on the map is the hill that we could see from my older house. I remember hearing rumors that there was a wild man that lived up there that survived off of eating mustard seed flowers. Being a child, I believed.

The last memory on my walk occurred at number 8 on the front lawn of my older home. This memory, I created a full illustration for. I remember my father showing me Halley’s Comet. It was twilight and he was pointing up into the sky. I don’t have a memory of actually seeing the comet, but I remember him telling me, “You will be eighty two when you see it again.”

A map for the reminiscing is a very specific map for the individual. Even one of my siblings could do the same walk and have completely different places and stories to note. A nice vigorous walk usually leaves the walker with an energized view of the future, but a walk with a reminiscent eye can leave the walker with a wistful view of time passing. 

Homophones

I had a lot of fun creating these four 11”x17” posters of homophones intended for classrooms. I chose this as the subject for my design project because I have a love for thinking about strange nuances in the English language. A few years back I made some illustrations for palindromes, “Eva, can I pose as Aesop in a cave?” So I thought homophones would be fun. I also have an appreciation for children’s very literal imaginations. Combining these two ideas, I wanted to create posters that were eye catching yet simple enough to understand. I remember when I was in grade school, enjoying looking around the classroom at the interesting educational posters on the wall, mostly, “say no to drugs” and “recycle”. I also wanted there to be some humor. Here is a brainstorming image from when I was starting out listing all of the homophones I thought might work well.

I actually made many pages of just lists and scribbles of different homophone words and sentences before I knew which four I was going to use. A few of my favorites that I did not end up using, the coward cowered. Oar or paddle? Coy koi. A careful gait on a shaky gate. Once I had picked the four I wanted to use, I started sketching. The following image is of a sketch that I planned out what colors might be best. The next sketch was when I was originally planning on the gait gate homophone but later into the process decided to do peddles petals instead. All of the sketches are very rough because knowing I was going to use Adobe Illustrator as my medium, I knew getting the sketches tight was not going to benefit me.

I just learned Adobe Illustrator in my design class last semester so I knew I wanted to try this project in that medium to get more practice. After many sketches I went over to the Adobe color palette web page and chose bright colors that were contrasting yet appealing together. Here are the colors I chose.

I then started laying out the background colors and text to get an idea of what fonts, sizes and color combinations looked good together. Even though the illustrations are the main beef of this project, they felt secondary for me because I knew the illustrations would come together. It was the fonts, colors, and layout I felt more pressure to get right. Here is what I started with. As you can see, I was planning on putting the individual homophone, for example, “She peddles petals”, at the bottom with the image and the main homophone rhyme at the top. Ryan, from my class, gave me feedback that it should be the other way around, the individual homophone as the highlight at the top with the rhyme at the bottom of each. It was great getting this feedback as it was something I hadn’t even considered but the second I read his recommendation I knew he was right. I also had a one-on-one meeting with my design teacher and she was able to help me with font suggestions, which was helpful as I have not taken the typography class yet and I don’t know anything about fonts. The more rounded font she suggested looks a lot better with the illustrations. She also gave me the idea of a bar of color background to highlight the words at the bottom beneath the illustration. She then let me know that the “nits” look more like rice on the boy’s head. I attempted to fix this by changing the shapes a little and adding tiny legs to the “nits” but I am not sure if it still looks like rice, but I feel I did what I could.

The next pictures are of the finished posters. I am happy with how they turned out. I could see these adding some fun and color on the walls of a fifth grade classroom. They are not necessarily intended to teach, but create a spark of interest and to open a door of curiosity in the mind about language. The best way for someone to learn is for them to have an interest in a subject and then take the initiative from there to learn more about it. My point is, these posters are not preachy or boring, they are a tool that could potentially spark interest in language. The last image is of all four posters side by side.

Here they are side by side.

Composition with a Grid

Composition with a Grid

The only grid like practices I had ever done were, just knowing the “rule of thirds” and then using a grid as a tool to copy an image. I had never composed with a grid and I really enjoyed it. At first I was going to do this project digitally thinking it would make things easier but I really had a hankering to get my hands on some scissors and paste. I tried to pick out and create different size objects to make the composition more interesting. My “thumbnails” consisted of sliding the objects around in different spaces trying to center them in squares and line up with the grid. I settled on creating two larger objects for the background and heavy at the bottom hinting at a base or floor. The grayscale girl and bowling pin on one side and the records and smaller object in the sky mimicking the one on the floor on the other side. I didn’t like how left right balanced it felt, so I colored what was left of the blank space with black, more on the left side, then pink, less on the right side, making the division exactly on a line from the grid. There was already texture on the magazine cutout of yellow so I wanted to match that but create a completely different texture on the blue, hence the dots. I’m sure the composition could be better, but I am very happy with it and feel I have gained another tool for my tool belt. I am learning: the more you plan a head, thumbnails, notes, sketches, grids, medium testing, etc., the more your project will turn out exactly how you want it.

Module 4 Reflection

In this module’s workload I loved reading Chapter 4 of Time Frames from Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. There was so much vocabulary and techniques that I had seen and experienced and even tried to attempt but never knew actually had a name. I learned Zip ribbons, continuous background, and general indicator. I also appreciated the emphasis on the panel itself contributing so much to the story. After reading this and watching Memento, I thought about the book Meanwhile by Jason Shiga. A choose-your-own-adventure comic. A person must be pretty clever and organized to be able to write multiple story lines in a completely different story telling order and pattern.

My daughter was home for spring break last week and we discussed Gestalt’s principles. She is majoring in psychology. First of all, she taught me how to pronounce Gestalt, haha. But we had a fun discussion of how our minds quickly process what we see and experience in order to make sense of the world around us. The way our minds automatically group together objects that are close (proximity) or the same color or shape (similarity) and how it responds to contrast, probably explains a lot of human behavior indicating that the storytelling of design can be very powerful.