Friday, November 24, 2006

CONCRETE POETRY


Concrete poetry is a term appeared in the early fifties. The term came simultaneously in three countries : Switzerland, Swiss and Brazil. Concrete poetry concentrate on how the poem looks on a page by changing line breaks, word spacing, line length and fonts. The way they they take the words out of the poem and the letters out of the words and play with their relation to the page can slightly alter the meaning of the text, however, the idea is very interesting. The visual form of the poem is as important as the words that make it . The reader can appreciate both the meaning and the visual form of the poem. This kind of representation makes poetry easier to feel and understand.
The new visual poem has made us aware of poetic content in the typographycal medium. When we know what the language is, what the poem is, we will know whether or not these texts are poetry. In terms of what we know about concrete poetry, these non-semantic visual poems present pattern and reticulation of visual linguistic elements that convey a nonspecific spiritual or aesthetic message

"Breezes," by Court Smith, THE WINDLESS ORCHARD

"Urban High Rises," by Court Smith


"Shaped Salmon," by Court Smith

Reference:

http://oregonstate.edu/~smithc/vita/concrpoe.html
http://www.gardendigest.com/concrete/
http://www.gardendigest.com/concrete/cvp52.htm

Thursday, November 23, 2006


Line Art

After the presentation of Kim Ngan group today – topic : Less rain – more warmth, I found line art is very interesting. Line art is images which is a combination of straight and curved lines in a plain background. It is a simple images without the changing of shade or hue. Line art is create mostly to represent a 2D or 3D dimensional objects.
Line art is used to emphasize form and outline of an object so it is very effective to highlight some characteristic of an object.

We can use Photoshop to design our own line art. It is very interesting. You can follow these steps to create your own line art.


1. Step 1:
Open Photoshop and import your picture.
It is better with picture that consists many lines and has simple background.
I use this image to show you example.



2. Step 2 :
After importing image, open filter ==> blur ==> smart blur
In smart blur, choose Quality : high , Mode : edge only
Radius : 47.2 , Threshold : 22.7

The result will look like this



3. Step 3 :
To change the image into line art, you go to image ==> adjustments ==> invert
or you can press Ctrl I

This looks like line art now...


You can improve the effect by adding some weight to this image.
Open Filter ==> Artistic ==> cutout.
In cutout, you can make the line thicker by changing the value of levels, edge simplicity or edge fidelity

These are my line arts

Is it cute???


Try it yourself