Thursday 23 August 2007

Expanded squares

I was intrigued by Jane Dunnewold's article on expanded squares a couple of issues back in QA magazine. Decided I needed to have a go. I copied one from the magazine just to get warmed up - that whole spatial thing isn't really me - I am a real klutz at it. However, once I got going I was okay - lots more ideas to try - I thinks Jane's recommendation to do one a day for a month to really get the hang of it is probably good advice - although I am not promising to do it! So far I have figured out that you can set the square on point, and go from there - on this one I divided the square in half and went in two different directions - if you see what I mean.


The next one I kept the square square on, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to flip the bits to the outside - I think I got it at one point, and ended up with something that looked like a swastika, so tried just flipping the bits up and down and my square expanded into a rectangle!







For the next one I decided to be a bit more unconventional - I quite like it! All of these were done with a piece of black paper, a pair of scissors and a glue stick. I then decided I would like to be able to do this electronically, using Photoshop, which I have recently started learning.





So I fiddled around and got stuck on some of the trickier bits - but fortunately, some lovely people on the Photoshop Yahoo group came to my rescue and before I knew if, I had it down pat. So here are a couple I did in Photoshop. The first is very much in the style that Jane Dunnewold does - I used that as a sample so I didn't have to worry about design AND the technicalities in Photoshop at the same time.
Then when I had it figured out, I made this one. Let me tell you - it beats chasing strange shaped bits of black paper around the floor, and accidentally flipping them over so you paste them on the wrong way around! I don't see myself doing paper ones every day for a month, but I could probably knock one out everytime I fire up Photoshop to do my homework assignments.


2 comments:

Sandy said...

I love the designs you did. Did it a while back and need to do it again. Yours inspire me. Sandy

Elizabeth said...

Thanks for this post on expanded squares. Your examples are inspiring. I love working with them myself. After reading this I've been checking out my Photoshop Elements to see what if anything I can do there.