APD Week 10 Play and Nature

By Xipeng Niu (Xavier)

Theme

Play and Nature

My response this week is nature texture coloring arts. I tried different methods to use textures from nature to replace colors. In response to the theme I want to explore a method to use nature textures as source for painting. My original plan was using chopped vegetables to paint like sand painting but I dropped it to avoid waste of food.

Context

The concept of finding inspiration from nature tour from this weeks’ lecture attracted my interest on using nature as sources. Land art Matt shared in Teams channel is also a good resource of art by nature (https://www.artalistic.com/en/blog/What-is-land-art/). So I started to researching on arts related to nature. A sand painting video by Fatmir Mura inspired me on using nature to replace pigment by nature resources (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zphbnum0_BY). The first idea came to my mind is using chopped vegetables as pigment to make a drawing. But considering the waste of it I decided to use textures on computer instead. The process of using new material to draw is really an interesting playing way which is a kind of play for creating based on Sicart’s (2014) theory.

Method

The method I used is picking textures with different colors first. Those textures are used as basic colors.

Then I tried to use those textures to make patterns in Adobe Illustrator. But due to the seems the result of it wasn’t good enough for painting. Then I tried to use textures on cubes in Blender to work as a digital chopped vegetable. But it still looks really weird.

After those failed experiments, I decided to using masks and selection in Photoshop to replace color with those textures.

Reflection

I have explored different methods to make this idea work. As a reflection the result of it is highly depended on texture images. If I draw images to make them as seamless pattern it will have better a visualization. Another thing is I am still wondering how it would like with chopped vegetable. Instead of using digital materials, I may should try this idea with natural materials like branched or leaves.

Reference

Sicart, M. (2014). Play matters. ProQuest Ebook Central https://ebookcentral.proquest.com