I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’re living in pretty uncertain times right now. There’s a steady stream of weird, bad, and very unpredictable news coming out of the US government. Language that dehumanizes marginalized communities makes its way into the headlines on the regular. It can be hard to know what to do in times like these, and when I don’t know what to do I always return to my personal mantra: “When in doubt, make something about it!“.
It wasn’t hard to convince the folks at Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild to bring me in for a world building workshop to help give a name and a shape to this constant uncertainty that seems to fill the air.
The Pitch: “Design a World of Uncertainty”
How can we as artists strengthen our design skills while acknowledging the craziness happening in our world? How can we explore this uncertainty without being completely consumed by it? Through the workshop “Exploring Uncertainty with World-Building”, I wanted to give students a chance to hold these questions together, and ultimately find inspiration- my favorite flavor of hope- in this time of change.
Moodboarding and Brainstorming
This part is important! We can’t just jump right in to drawing “uncertainty”. The prompt is inherently vague; full of the unknown, formless, shifting, hard to pin down. The brainstorming phase gives students a chance to wrap their head around the idea. We do this through Moodboarding: collecting images from around the web that capture the feeling.
Student Moodboard Example:
It’s important that Moodboarding is open-ended and social. I want to hear students talking amongst themselves, asking questions, showing each other weird pictures they found. This gets them talking about the mood, and that’s how I know we’re going in the right direction. Here are a couple quotes from this workshop…
“Ugh! How do you visualize a feeling that doesn’t even know what it is??”
“Whelp, this isn’t uncertain… it’s just scary”
“I need to find the perfect empty hallway to get lost in.”
“Whelp, this isn’t uncertain… it’s just scary”
“I need to find the perfect empty hallway to get lost in.”
Reflecting and Refining
We saved the moodboards to a shared folder so that everyone could look at one another’s ideas. This is super helpful in creating a social atmosphere because inevitably someone’s going to comment on a picture from something they recognize (“Who put Sonic in here???”). We take some time to check out each other’s work before moving on to the next phase: Visualizing.
COLOR
Shape
Pattern
“Swatches” are what I use to capture the visual essence of a mood. For this process we create a new blank canvas no bigger than 500px square (a smaller canvas keeps things more abstract because there’s less space to add detail). Focusing on the colors, patterns, and shapes in the moodboards, students construct a single image to represent uncertainty.
Student Swatches:
Swatches as a Building Block
Finally we’re at the point everyone’s been waiting for- it’s time to turn our visual motifs into a world of uncertainty. This is the part of the workshop that tends to be the quietest, with students focused on creating objects that might exist in a world of Uncertainty. Using the swatch as your inspiration, design a creature, a landmark, or some feature that could exist in a world with this aesthetic.
The canvas is bigger for this part of the project and I want to encourage students to get into it with details and textures. In this version of the workshop students are free to come back later to finish their art, so I wasn’t too worried about everyone finishing up their designs.
Translating Our Swatches
Bringing the World to Life
Students have most of the second half of class to work on their world pieces. As they finish up their designs, I copy their work into a single scene on the projector. I love seeing how a scene comes together with the collective work of every student.
Inevitably, no matter how much time we have to finish the workshop, we will run out. By the end of class not everyone has finished their designs, and some will come back to keep working on the details of their world pieces. Hopefully there’s enough inspiration in the visual motifs and moodboard collections to continue creating art inspired by uncertainty, and it’s a very cool process to see students become more curious about how to express emotion in their artwork.
Mission accomplished!
Mission accomplished!
2 responses to “Uncertainty”
This is such a positive way to help people deal with the crazy. Love the steps, the connection, the love you put into this project. Thank you for sharing because the best thing to remember in these times is that we are not alone. Love this. Love you
Aww thank you Denise!! I’m so glad you found this project to be hopeful and inspiring 🙂 And yes- I agree so much with the sentiment of remembering you are not alone. It’s a theme I always try to carry through these workshops and it is SO important.