Art « Jason Olney

June 5, 2012 by Jason

Art Assignment

Most of the art I do, I do for other people. Sometimes I can’t find the time to make art for myself, and sometimes I just don’t know what to make. A blank page with no direction or goal can be daunting.

Back in March, a couple of friends of mine, Leanne Pedante and Kati Driscoll, started the first annual Fun-A-Day in the First State. It is what the name implies, you make a piece of art every day for a month and then at the end there is a big show. This was exactly the kind of thing that I was looking for! Unfortunately I had a lot going on that month (I chickened out) and didn’t participate. I will definitely participate next year.

Luckily, Leanne has come up with another great project: Art Assignment. This is a slightly more directed activity where you are given a word every week to create art about. When you complete the assignment, you upload it to the website. The current word is “transmute” and I have no idea what I’m going to make, but my creative juices are flowing (I do not actually excrete fluid while creating).

Join us! Anybody can be an artist. You can include audio, video, poetry, whatever! It’s fun and it gives you an excuse to make art for yourself.

Below are some examples of past assignments from various artists.

: Remains of a Rainbow – Jenna Ann Broderick

: Remains – Leanne Pedante

: Remains – Brad Wallace

: Hudson Castle Remains – Jacob Mitas

: Remains – Jason Olney

: Native Income – Rodrigo Llauro

: Income – Ashley Cleaver

: Income – Wendy McReynolds

: Income – Jason Olney

Tags: Art, creative, project

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April 26, 2012 by Jason

Optical Illusions

I love optical illusions. Nothing gets my attention more than an impossible shape or a scintillating pattern. Optical illusions reveal the limitations or foibles of our brains. What’s a better artistic subject than something that shows us our senses can be tricked.

Most optical illusions are tricks that can be performed by transferring three dimensional shapes to a two dimensional surface. The best example of this is Ascending and Descending created by M.C. Escher. This is a staircase that obviously cannot exist in real life, but it’s difficult at first to see why.

This is how congress works

Then there are simpler impossible shapes like the impossible fork.

One more excuse for your kid to not eat broccoli

I love this table illusion. The two table tops are exactly the same shape. But your brain won’t let you see that until you take the shapes out of a three dimensional context.

Another kind of illusion is one of context. We can easily be tricked about the size, color or shape of an object depending on what it is placed next to.

This is the most important illusion to be aware of when designing. A single color can look like two completely different colors depending on what colors are placed next to them. A center line can look off center depending on what’s near it. As designers, we have to take these tricks in to account and try not to let them ruin a good design.

There are a lot of logos that employ the ambiguous illusion. This is when you can flip between two different ways of seeing an image. My favorite example is the Yoga Australia logo.