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The first basic design assignment !
  The freshers to the course of architectural studies are actually like raw material. Generally it's an uphill task for basic design professors to bring the student on the common platform of understanding, and to make them familiar with the vocabulary of visual design. The terms like visual perceptions, the role of art in architecture, the difference between terminology like skills, craft, artifacts, artwork, and work of art are hardly known to new students. It is also necessary to make these students versatile with the experience of doing something by their own hands that is to create something of their own. Pre- College students are absolutely new to the process of designing. Pre-College technique of studying is sometimes based on mere mugging and reproduction of given notes at the time of the examination hour. The students mostly have very crude and undefined ideas about the concept of designing. Also they do not understand the difference between the two verbs "designing" and "creating art". The first and foremost aspect about which all students of design should have clarity, is the concept of "composition". The unconscious mind of any individual of any age knows how to make a choice about good and bad compositions. Daily newspapers, magazines, books have several illustrations in the form of advertisements. Experienced professionals of visual art design all these advertisements. These illustrations are also readily available to the students, and they are constantly being exposed to it. The subjects in these illustrations from magazines, daily newspapers etc are also full of variety, they contain human beings, animals, trees, flowers, leaves, mountains, rivers, sand dunes and numerous such subjects. The subjects are either artificially composed or photographed as a composed object. As a part of their first assignment of basic design, the students are asked to select a number of such compositions in the form of printed photographs, pictures, advertisements and illustrations from the available books and magazines. Initially their selection is based on the logic "I like it" and "I don't like it". In the question-and-answer session and interaction with the student, students are exposed to the collected material of the whole class, and in a way they visually see 40 times more work than actually they would have done in isolation (each class of first-year architecture has 40 students). After the process of selection of visual material, in order to discover and unmask the basic composition in the pictures, which the students have collected, students are asked to remove the smaller details from these pictures. The pictures which are visually "meaningful" in the conventional manner become "abstract". Now from this abstracted version it is easier for students to understand the bare composition made up of basic visual elements like dots, lines, shapes, colour and texture also. For first time students are able to analyze the underlying principles, which make the composition look balanced and proportionate. The abstraction is a technique adopted by artists from historical times to bring out the aesthetics of the subject. The basic visual element of the line itself is the most primitive abstract artistic expression. By application of the grid, technique of smudging, elimination of colour, one can create abstract versions of the same "meaningful" pictures that have been collected by students.

Students are asked to collect several, pictures, photographs and illustrations from magazines or any other material. These pictures are supposed to be the pictures that are "the best" from student's point of view. Subsequently students are asked to make sketches, based on these compositions and to create an abstracted version of the original picture.

Students are asked to adopt following techniques for abstraction

To eliminate details.
To convert three-dimensional picture into two-dimensional line work.
To draw the same picture by using dots.
To draw the same picture by using technique of smudging and undefined hazy shapes.
To eliminate the colours.
To adopt new colour scheme.

Design Application


For more details contact Ar. Shirish Sukhatme
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