The objective of this project was to construct a word out of ink marks that aligns with the words meaning and connotation. For example, the word ‘zig-zag’ could be made out of jagged, alternating strokes, however, ‘zig-zag’ might be too generic of a word. The class was instructed not to use cliché words or words that are the exact object used to create the mark.

There was no target audience.

I flung black ink onto multiple canvas seemingly at random to try and come up with an interesting shape, pattern, or texture. I used many day-to-day objects to achieve these marks, like a paper cup, a pipe cleaner, plastic utensils, and my finger. I also explored different directions, angles, and speeds when applying the ink. This was all about experimentation, however, there was no real end goal at this stage.

After my ink marks were all on my paper, I chose ten interesting shapes to explore further. For each one, I was to come up with a unique word that corresponded to the attitude of the mark. I started off by rattling off a bunch of descriptors, and I narrowed them down through synonyms I thought of myself or that I found on Thesaurus.com. Some iterations are created by combining multiple adjectives into one, and others are created with imagery, like ‘pyrotechnics’ and ‘quantum’.After this, I chose five to sketch in full and they were critiqued by the class. The winner came out to be ‘quantum,’ so I snapped a picture of my marks and imported them into Photoshop. From there, it was mostly tinkering to make the circles appear as the letters and adding a couple extra details around the word.

The word that I settled on was ‘quantum,’ and I wanted to highlight the science-y aspects that usually accompany that word. Excluding the T, I made each letter signify an electron field in circular forms. Then, for some strokes, I duplicated them but displaced the copy by just a hair from the original so that it seemed as if the stroke was in two places at once: in a quantum state. I added extra elongated and magnified circles around the word to give a sense of wholeness, like the word was intertwined with itself.