Read

 

(Listening to Panda Bear's Tomboy in the background + drinking a glass of Wrongo Dongo Monastrell wine).

  I wanted to share a behind the scenes look into how I approach the geo melee work.  I used this piece that spells out "READ" as an example.  I started out tracing a border with a ruler then lightly traced each letter.  Afterwards, I randomly added simple geometry to follow the letter paths I made.  There are squares, circles, rectangles, arrows, triangles, semi-circles, parallelograms, and trapezoids with a rare appearance of ad-hoc geometries I used to fill in non-symmetrical empty spots.

  The 'A' wasn't as wide when I originally traced this, so I compensated and measured how much space I had to make the 'D'.  I had the room, but I couldn't make the 'D' any wider or I'd be out of the border.

  Once the shapes were outlined with a pencil, I followed up with a thin point sharpie.  This is my 4th time outlining tiny geometries with a sharpie and I felt pretty confident.

 I specifically chose the word 'read', because it's back to school season.  People are school shopping and I wanted to  make a piece to reflect the learning vibe many kids will experience.  I personally am a temperamental reader.  I can get through blogs fine, and short stories, but I have a horrible attention span for long novels.

  This is the fun part where I do a marker round robin.  I began coloring in the 'R' in 1 geometry for each letter and follow with the other colors.  I soon realized I had used too much brown, I bumped it out of the rotation.  To speed things up, I colored 3 geometries at a time.  When the majority of geometries were filled, I gazed at the gestalt and figure out what is the best color based on the neighboring colors.

  I go through and fill in the geometries I missed, erase the pencil lines, and fill in the border.  My wife suggested I try doing a green border and like a good husband I listened. ; p

There are additional things on the computer I could do, but it is complete and shows the process for how I've approached slamming random colored geometry together or what I call a Geo Melee.