Sunday 4 February 2018

Design Your Own 1 - Papercuts - Designing Bridges, or, how to avoid confetti and unresolved designs!

One thing I've noticed from being in a variety of Facebook Groups to do with papercraft and the Brother Scan N Cut machine, is how many people are a bit flummoxed about designing their own images and cutting files. One of the key reasons for me choosing to buy the SNC was because, for the first time, I would be able to easily make my own designs and not be tied into buying someone else's.

So, this part of the series is to give some basic techniques and pointers on how to design your own images and cut files so that they
a. look 'resolved' - are pleasing to the eye, the design flows well and feels cohesive and finished, and also
b. work in technical terms - they don't fall apart into confetti or have layers that are impossible to match.

Here's the first one - this falls into the TECHNICAL side of designing your own images for the SNC - all about Building Bridges or Connections between the elements that make up a finished design.
White Rabbit by EmbellishCuts (currently available as a free pdf download HERE February 2018)
 WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY BUILDING BRIDGES OR CONNECTIONS?

Well, look at the white rabbit image above. You can see there's a rabbit in a hat. And the rabbit in the hat is surrounded by pop art/comic book style 'explosion' lines. These give dynamism and a sense of movement to the overall design. Then, the whole of the rabbit, hat and explosion lines, are sitting within an oval frame.

You can see all that? Good.

Now, LOOK at the rabbit image above and imagine that all the grey coloured areas are holes. Empty space. Nothingness.

IF the Embellish Cuts designer had just done the shapes of the the rabbit and the hat, and left out the explosion lines, what she'd actually have is the rabbit and hat elements totally separate to the oval outer frame - aka a pile of confetti that would need to be glued down to a backing paper, to keep the rabbit, hat and frame in relationship to each other.

HOWEVER, by choosing to include the EXPLOSION LINES - which CONNECT or BRIDGE the gaps between the rabbit and hat in the centre and the oval frame - then the design doesn't fall apart - instead of being a series of shapes that need glueing to a backing paper in the right places, it is instead, a single piece of paper with holes where the different shapes stay in relationship with each other without needing any intervention with glue or other fixative.

So, in conclusion - Bridges or Connections - are how you keep your shapes in relationship to each other the way YOU want them within a single cohesive design that is essentially a single piece of card or paper with structural integrity.

Oh, right, so, it's like the difference between using a Stencil Style font and another other Print Type Font? If I used the Stencil Font, there's Bridges and Connections so that the middle doesn't fall out of the O, or the R or two of them out of the B? Right? YES! Absolutely!

Stencil Font vs. Bog Standard Font
As you can see above, because the red letter O has two little vertical Bridges at the top and the bottom, if that shape was cut from a piece of paper, what is coloured red would become shaped holes - and the integrity of the letter O would remain.

However, if the blue letter O was cut from a piece of paper, BOTH the blue shape AND the white space inside the letter would fall out and become empty space.

There's absolutely NOTHING wrong with a letter that either has a middle to it, or lacks a middle - the issue is - did the designer INTEND there to be a middle or not? The designer is the one who makes decisions over what will and won't be part of the design. It's all about making INFORMED CHOICES

Bridges or connections enable more complexity of holes when papercutting.

WHEN WOULD YOU NEED TO CONSIDER USING BRIDGES OR CONNECTIONS?

You would use them whenever you are wanting to create complex shapes with clear meanings with a material that won't be fixed to something else. ie paper or card.

For example, you tend not to need Bridges with vinyl, because you are always going to adhere the vinyl to some sort of backing - a bag, a wall, a mug, etc. Each separate individual shape within a design on vinyl will stay in relationship to each other BECAUSE you use transfer tape or contact paper to move it, in entirety to the final position.

Similarly, you tend not to need Bridges with applique (sewing), because you are always going to adhere the cloth to some sort of backing - a quilt top or cusion cover etc - either with a bond or by sewing. You assemble the design as individual pieces by hand on the backing cloth.

But if you are working with paper,  or card, if you want design that holds itself together with each shape (and hole) in the chosen relationship to each other - Bridges or Connections are the way forwards!

THOSE TWO SORTS OF BRIDGES ABOVE, THEY'RE VERY DIFFERENT!

Yes they are. It's why I chose those two examples.

With the Stencil Alphabet, the Bridges are not a thing of beauty! They hold the 'holes' inside letters where they need to be to make it easy to read the text/words being written at a glance. That's why the military used this type of font to mark up crates of equipment - it's an exceptionally clear way of making sure there's no misunderstandings on legibility in an emergency.

http://www.milweb.net/dealers/trader/stencilade/


The Bridges with the Stencil Alphabet are there from necessity, and are a no frills workaday slightly ugly solution not suitable for say a romantic style image. However, knowing they exist and how they differ from other fonts, that gives a designer CHOICES.  And Choices are what designing is all about!

However, with the White Rabbit design, the Bridges are fully integrated into the design in a very sophisticated way.

I'd like to look at that more carefully in design terms, because when you look at it as an overall design, it fells really resolved and completed, the lines draw your eye into the middle and away from it, and around the outside, and back in again. It's visually very interesting. It looks super simple, and yet, it's actually a highly sophisticated design in the way it uses Positive and Negative Space, and also implies things are going on outside the frame, using Edge Tension.

WHAT IS POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE SPACE?

Let's start with some basic definitions:
Positive = something is there, existing
Negative = nothing is there, it is missing

So with the rabbit image, the WHITE is positive space and the GREY is negative space, because when the image is cut out, the grey areas are holes.

With the blue and red alphabets - the red colour of the stencil is definately negative, because that's the bit that when it's cut out, won't exist anymore, and the white mat is positive.

But what about the blue alphabet, that doesn't have bridges, well, we have to imagine what it will look like when it's been cut out. So actually the white mat outside the letter O is positive space, but the blue letter itself AND the white space inside the letter O will be holes, they won't exist and therefore they are BOTH negative space.

Sometimes a space could be either positive or negative - think for example of a zebra - it is striped. Entirely striped. Is it white stripes on black or black stripes on white?
Victor Vasrely
 Here is the same image, with a white background and with a black background - with an image like this, what is positive or negative space, it plays with your brain, black and white could be either, depending on the choices the designer makes.
CurkovicArtUnits http://bit.ly/2nBhkOp

 Escher was an artist who played with positive and negative space and optical illusions - what starts as a bird and you think is Positive space, with the landscape in the background being Negative space, within a few elements as your eye moves around, you find is the other way around.
Escher - optical illusion by drawing playing with positive and negative space
WHY DOES POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE SPACE MATTER?

Because BOTH are necessary for our human eyes to make sense of what we are seeing.  We live in a three dimensional world, and when looking at a two dimensional image, our eyes and brain work together to make sense of it, to put that image in a context. We don't just look at the 'positive' element, and say, oh, a bird, we also look at the 'negative' element and say oh a landscape behind it, that puts the image in context and allows us to understand it better.

The Victorians were very keen on optical illusions. A typical one is the beautiful young woman who is also an old crone - in the same picture
Can you see a beautiful young woman with her head turned away, but also an old crone with her chin buried in her coat?
And my point is? Well, that the human eye uses BOTH the solid shapes it can see, but also the lack of shapes to make sense of an image.  Which brings us to Edge Tension.

WHAT IS TENSION IN DESIGN?

Tension is an important part of a design. It adds dynamism and movement to what is essentially a static unmoving fixed thing.

It can be within the composition itself, for example, Cezanne in this painting perched the skull precariously on a pile of fabric and the fruit perilously close to the edge of the table. Your eye is taken from one element to another by the folds in the fabric and halted at the table edge, your eye is guided in a smooth flowing or an abruptly ending way around the picture. It provides Tension. A feeling of movement, dynamism, even anxiety!
Cezanne - Still Life
Similarly, Cezanne has CHOSEN to cut off the table legs. We KNOW that tables have legs, we know that tables are generally of a decent height to be able to put your legs under them to sit down comfortably. Cezanne doesn't need to show us the full leg length because he assumes that the viewer knows the table and the walls extend outside the area he has chosen to concentrate on.

And it's that knowledge and understanding by the viewer that 'something is happening or continuing outside the frame' which provides Edge Tension.  We know that if that apple that appears to be mid roll, or the precariously perched pear topples off the table, it's a long drop and it's going to bruise the fruit. And that knowledge that we have gives an extra context and meaning to what's actually shown by the artist.

And that assumed knowledge and 'edge tension' means that designers can play with the viewer and the viewer's perceptions to make them see what's NOT there, using positive and negative space and tension and edge tension.

For example in this blog post HERE which I shall leave you to read for yourself, they slowly build up cut pieces around a space that, when adjusted to remove the centre, our eyes 'imagine' to be a rectangle.

So. This is a black rectangle of paper with shapes cut out and flipped to outside the rectangle.
Helpful Art Teacher Positive & Negative shapes
 With this black rectangle, we can see there's positive and negative shapes, they mirror each other on the edges of the rectangle. Interestingly, if we REMOVE the black rectangle, what do we see?

Helpful Art Teacher - Ghost Rectangle

We see the GHOST of the black rectangle. We know there isn't a rectangle there, but it's the negative and positive mirroring of the cut outs in an arrangement that we recognise as denoting a rectangle, that allows our eyes to 'see' something that isn't actually there - the outline of a rectangle. Our eyes 'fill in' where we feel a rectangle ought to be. One could almost swear there IS an outline of a rectangle, because of the way our eyes move around an image or design, the pattern is 'visible' as a whole or when looking at parts only, such as the 3 shapes at the bottom, in isolation, they all end at the same point at the top, giving the impression of being overlaid by a ghost white piece of paper.

So back to the Rabbit PDF for manual papercut that we started with.

WHAT MAKES THE WHITE RABBIT SUCH A WELL RESOLVED AND SATISFYING DESIGN?

I want you to REALLY look at this White Rabbit image. To be conscious of the path your eye takes as you do your initial sweep of the whole image, to make sense of it, and then which bits your eye goes to next and in what order, what path does your eye take? Fill your screen with the image.

White Rabbit papercut template by EmbellishCuts

 I'm English, I read English text which goes from left to right, top to bottom. So when I look at this image, broadly speaking my eye starts at the top left of the oval, hits the isolated star and keeps going until it hits the left ear, then moves down to the face, around the shape of the nose, down to the grey star and two dots in the explosion line, then flicks across to the other star that's white, then back to the star and dots, down to the body, over to the right to the other grey star and two dots, then zigzags down the hat to the stars at the bottom. Then my eye looks at the whole thing.

The reason this design feels so resolved to my eye, I feel, is that at every point at which my eye runs out of something new to look at, there's a shape or element providing a pivot point for my eye to change direction and run off to look at something else. There's a rhythmic pattern of left to right, down, across, down across. Like a zigzag. Each pivot point gives me something new to look at, and yet the whole design is made up of the outlines only of straight and curved lines that join each other, and stars and dots.

There's NOTHING here, no single element that doesn't belong, there's a nice balance between space (grey) and solidity (white) between negative and positive.

And there's just enough information for our eyes to make us believe we see something that isn't there too, so the design doesn't need outlines, it's all about shape and form.

The curve of the nose makes our eye believe it bulges three dimensionally.
The size and position of the rabbit eye makes us believe it is looking up and out of the design
The stars and dots are shapes that culturally we think of as denoting movement or explosions, vibrancy (think comic books and Pop Art, Lichtenstein's Wow paintings).
The top hat (like the Helpful Art Teacher's ghost rectangle) isn't actually a full hat, it's crown is two bands of white and one of grey and our eye adds in the outline of the crown of a top hat, because we know what one should look like.  It's really a ghost hat! t

In the same way the rabbit isn't really a rabbit, and we don't even SEE the magician, but we know, subliminally, there's a magician in action producing a rabbit from a hat.

Have you noticed there's NO demarcation of where the rabbit and hat end or start? they're a single unit of hat brim and rabbit body, but it doesn't matter does it? one's eye 'knows' they are separate, it understands the concept of a rabbit in a hat, and a magician we can't even see is understood to exist outside the picture).

But above all, and most cleverly in my view, is how the designer has anchored the rabbit in the hat inside the Oval frame.

She has chosen to attach the main motif of a rabbit in a hat - SOLELY by attaching the ears to the frame. I say solely, in terms of perspective, our eyes read the rabbit in the hat as being in the forefront, the empty grey space as the background, and the explosion lines filling the space between the two.

What attaches the rest of the rabbit and hat inside the frame, to maintain the integrity of the proportion and relationship - are the explosion lines. Which are spacially in a different layer to the rabbit in the hat, our eye reads them as being behind the rabbit and hat, but in reality, they are all on a single two dimensional plane of a single piece of paper.

And the GENIUS of this, is that the explosion lines (and the ears) ARE the Bridges or Connections that hold the whole papercut together.


Above with the military style stencil font - the bridges are purely functiona., utilitarian - they make sure that the centre of the letters don't fall out. That's all they do. And in the context of a crate full of military equipment, those utilitarian bridges are exactly right for the job they need to do.

However, with White Rabbit, the designer has deliberately chosen to make the bridges an integral part of her design so that they don't interrupt it, they don't even just look pretty, they are structurally and visually necessary for the cohesion of the whole picture:

Not only do they hold the whole design together as Bridges,

Not only do the shape and direction of each bridge provide 'routes' for the eye to see the picture,

But also, the existence of the explosion lines as bridges, as explosions, ties into our cultural expectations of a rabbit springing out of a hat, as an explosive moment of surprise (even if we expected the magician to produce the rabbit from the hat, it still has to happen) and gives us context for the image, it ties the design to a particular moment in time, perhaps of happy memories, of childhood delight and mystery.

The Bridges or Connections in this White Rabbit design work really hard on multiple levels, as well as being the fundamental building blocks that hold the design together so it doesn't turn into confetti!

The lady behind EmbellishCuts has a Facebook Group HERE - and sells her designs in PDF form on Etsy and on her own website. I must admit I adore her work, she also designed the Flamingos image in my Extreme Test Cutting post. She also creates a splendid monthly box for handpapercutters (that if you know how to scan in an image and convert it to an svg for use in canvas, works really well with the SNC machine).

Whew!!! I know that was a rather involved gallop through some design techniques that take a bit of thinking about to get one's head around and are not particularly easy to incorporate into one's own work, but hopefully tying it to specific concrete images that are fairly diverse will have helped you understand (if you didn't already) both the WHY (the ideas of design) and the HOW (using Bridges or Connections) come together to make a succesful and resolved design.

Obviously there's loads more to cover, but I think that's quite enough for now! No idea what's next, I'll have to see what takes my fancy. Perhaps because it's directly related, albeit in mirror image, some thoughts on designing Stencils. Then Registration Marks maybe? which is all about keeping multicoloured designs that have to be cut separately (one shape per colour) in proportion to each other - usually used with multicoloured vinyl designs and also with stencils.

REMEMBER all my blog posts about ScanNCut will be posted on this facebook page - it's probably the easiest way for you to be notified when there's a new one https://www.facebook.com/goblinfsncbasics/

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