Not much happens at 5:36 pm. A biker is nearly bludgeoned by a bus making a right turn onto Millvale, but then again the streets are narrow and not much else exciting happens. Foot traffic is sparse, consisting of mainly those in their 20s and 30s; not too many ethnic minorities trek through here. Everybody is either carrying a purse, backpack, groceries, or laundry of some sort. There are sometimes joggers or gym goers returning to their living spaces as well. And of course, since there’s a giant hospital along Liberty, the occasional doctor or nurse retires from their workday and walks back home.
There aren’t a whole lot of shops around. A bank is situated diagonally across the hospital, and these two buildings seem to be the reason anyone would willingly stop here. Facing the hospital are a hot dog shop, a tiny massage parlor, and a florist. These are separated by modern-looking structures, all owned by the hospital’s medical foundation, and above all these buildings are one or two floors of apartments. Further down is an anarchist book shop; actually, it’s the one place where where people bother to stop by. They sit down by the lone table with radical books open, discussing plans to meet up again some other time. I assume they’re the “locals”.
I sit down against the brick wall of a parking garage, phone ready to capture the surroundings. It’s now the second time I’ve visited this intersection, and I’m now aware of what I’m looking for. Every time a doctor or nurse walks out of the hospital is a new picture. I capture tired looking dads holding groceries in one hand and their toddlers in another, eager to keep walking home. Aside from an occasional angry honk from a turning bus or the whoosh of a passing biker or the constant gentle breeze, there’s hardly a sound to be heard. The parking garage offers a bird’s eye view of the intersection, and confirms my suspicion that nobody is here to stay.
It’s a shame because the buildings across the hospital look welcoming. A bit patina’d from age, no doubt, but there’s a charm to the rough poles and walls painted over with solid colors. The modern, metallic style of the medical buildings separate the classic, brick-laid look of the hot dog shop, florist, and bookstore. I try to capture every detail of these structures, knowing that even though each close-up picture doesn’t tell a full story, it helps me understand the place personally.
Luckily, the streets are wide enough for cars to park next to the bike lane. Parking, of course, isn’t an issue, with a giant multi-story garage located next to the hospital across Millvale. Patients likely enter through a bridge connecting the hospital and garage, but for the occasion that an elderly patient needs to traverse a crosswalk, there are no signals and the drivers around are vicious.
Back in the studio, I chose a picture looking away from the hospital and towards the shops along Liberty Avenue, with bikers riding through the street. I experimented with various crops and settled on this square:
I then made a mock-up of this final low relief using regular printer paper. Figuring out where to include detail and where to remove it was a difficult decision. In my mock-up I placed the emphasis on the bikers and the perspective of the windows in the buildings.
For my final draft, I traced over my source image with tracing paper and then transferred the line work onto 100lb Bristol drawing paper.
I found that cutting the Bristol paper was much more difficult than regular printer paper, and that as a result my edges were a lot less refined with thicker paper. Most of my windows had a rounded-ness to them due to the edges ripping off as I cut through. However, the thicker paper also created a much more defined border around each form.
After the first critique and advice from Stacie, I took away a few major points to improve for the next white-on-white draft:
- None of my forms popped enough; from a distance the relief looked too flat.
- The buildings in the background looked as if there was only one building, due to the fact it was a single layer and the only separation between the buildings was mild embossing.
- Replace my Xacto blades more often.
Taking this in mind, I turned each building into a separate cut form and overlapped them slightly to create a more prominent shadow. Subordinate structures, such as metal box and window protruding from a gap between two buildings, I also captured as a separate form.
Before creating this second draft, I imported my image into Illustrator and sketched my design out. This way, I could modify nuances in each form (for example, the shape of the gaps in the bikers communicate the biker’s pose, which was important to show their movement) without having to cut a new draft every time. Also, this allowed me to separate buildings, cars, and bikers into their respective layers and I could print these out as templates for tracing and cutting. Mocking up digitally took the majority of my time on this 2nd draft, but having a digital copy of my relief was a blessing for later iterations of this project.
Working with four shades of gray (brown) paper was vastly different than cutting white-on-white, but it was definitely a welcome change. I found that it was easier to separate forms using tones instead of relying on layering to create shadows.
I had to change up my workflow with grayscale paper: for example, instead of cutting out windows in a building and pasting the cutout directly onto the square, I started putting different shades of paper underneath to show the tonal differences in the windows. Some forms were broken up and required several pieces where they were once just one piece in the white-on-white draft.
Due to these differences, the templates I used for white-on-white no longer worked for the new shapes needed, and I ended up having to print out several complete mockup files to use as templates. Since the light box was not strong enough to penetrate the paper, I flipped the templates, pasted them to the back of the colored paper and cut through both the template and underlying grayscale paper.
Thankfully, the grayscale paper was much easier to cut than Bristol paper, allowing for cleaner cuts and more confident lines. However, it also meant that the complicated bikers I made in the white version had to be simplified since the paper tore much more easily while cutting.
My final draft, although much more representative of the intersection than the white on white, still had a few issues:
- Finding a visual balance and emphasis point between the light bikers and dark buildings was difficult; this draft emphasized the architecture more, which I felt was a unique feature.
- Some forms disappeared against same-colored forms, since tonal differences are stronger than cast shadows from layered paper.
For this version of the intersection relief, we were given 9 shades of colored paper and the option to swap a grayscale tone out for one of said colors. We were also allowed to selectively swap forms of a chosen gray tone out for color, so not all forms for a tone needed to be colored.
Initially, I was clueless as to what color and where I should add it, so I made a color palette using squares of the paper. I jotted down words relating to each color:
I noticed that a fair portion of the words I wrote were times of the day, so I tried making drafts were I swapped the sky’s gray tone out for a color. However, I decided that just swapping out the sky was too static and decided to experiment with changing the color of the buildings too. When trying different combinations in Illustrator proved to be no use, I realized that by leaving the sky white, I was limiting my options. Changing the sky to a darker color opened up a whole new realm of possibilities:
I eliminated bright yellow because it would draw too much attention away from the bikers in the foreground. Pastel blue was out of the running since I wanted to portray a welcoming, almost homely environment, compared to the coolness given off by the blue. Orange also overpowered to bikers even though I loved the warmth it gave the composition. This left with me with a golden yellow to replace the gray tones in select buildings:
