lines lines lines all around town!

where we last left off in viscom process, i had just been safariing for photos, and pairing up line compositions with found occurrences in kansas city. i've been so busy doing viscom that i haven't had the chance to talk about it in a while! (always still working on that time management, i'm figuring it out slowly but inexorably...!)

here are some of my favourite pairings from this stage of the process. obviously there's no room for everything as we keep moving forward, but there were quite a few here i was equally excited about...

brick wall in westport

blue windowed building on 35th & broadway

the kc life insurance facade

penn valley skate park

downtown as seen from the scout at penn valley park

the uptown theatre on valentine

railing from the plaza

decorative border above a plaza door.

the next step was taking our best six pairings and making an analog collage composition out of them. i couldn't choose between plaza pairings, so i tried two. one was a lot more successful than the other.

i experimented briefly with trying to come up with a cohesive visual system for the naming, (the horizontal bands that stretch across some of the pages, & always using the same typeface,) but that unification proved less important in than just having well designed stand-on-their-own compositions. 

this round easily eliminated the broadway building, the plaza railing, and the penn valley park. each of those seemed to work much better as side-by-side pairings than integrated compositions, especially the skate park. those shadows on the stairs were so uncannily perfect! such a great find. but i just didn't know how to convey enough information about the part of town with them & the line composition, nevermind get it to look nice enough on its own. as for the broadway building, the angles were never going to get quite right due to the perspective that occurs when a short human takes a photograph of a tall building. and the plaza railing? may have had a nice curvilinear shape, but i just did not find anything effective to do with it. 

so the next step was to take our 3 best analog collages and digitize them, each with 3 iterations. despite my deep adulation for the downtown pairing, i decided to work with the plaza border, the westport bricks, and the valentine theatre lights. i found it much easier to work with small swatches of imagery than huge scale landscapes, particularly because, knowing me, i would have been so caught up in trying to make my skyline composition "worthy" of the actuality that i likely would've gotten myself stuck. i'll save my love for downtown kansas city for the next project! 

coming up next: digital compositions & critique with david white.