Build A Paper City and Decorate it With Abstract Designs Using Photoshop

Today we are going to learn about abstract art and how it has influenced all modern designs. You can see it's influence everywhere, from packaging to fashion (and textile) design to furniture to architecture to advertising. 

Since abstract expressionism has had an undeniable effect on modern designers, it's important for us to learn about it, so that we can both recognize it's influences and apply the concepts we learn to our own artwork. 

Here are some excellent videos that explain modern non-representational (or non-objective) art and the Abstract Expressionist movement.

It's possible to use the Elements of Art and Principles of Design and Composition to make a strong, original design, without your artwork being representational or containing recognizable images.

 Here are some useful worksheets that will help you create stronger, more interesting abstract designs:

The next five black and white printable worksheets come from a book called Creative Illustration by Andrew Loomis. It is out of print but you can still find online PDF free copies of the original text online through the Internet Archive. 

The original book contains nudes, but if you click here you can access an edited PG version of the original suitable for high school students. 

Abstract expressionism began its development in the early part of the 20th century but gained broad popularity in the post-war 1940's. It's influence was everywhere, throughout the 40's, 50's, 60's and 70's. 

Movement 1, 1935 by Wassily Kandinsky

Kandinsky often named his paintings using the same conventions that classical musicians commonly use. This is not a coincidence. He felt that, just as music does not have to have lyrics, paintings do not have to have subjects. Just as music can be beautiful in its own right, art can be comprised of beautiful shapes, colors and lines without having to tell a specific story.

"The neurological phenomenon Kandinsky experienced is called synesthesia (or “joined perception,” from the Greek word syn meaning “join” and aisthesis meaning “perception”). It’s a rare but real condition in which one sense, like hearing, concurrently triggers another sense, such as sight. People with synesthesia might smell something when they hear a sound, or see a shape when they eat a certain food. Kandinsky literally saw colors when he heard music, and heard music when he painted."- Renée B. Miller, Denver Art Museum

 Here are some photographs of Jackson Pollack creating his action paintings in the 1940's and 50's.

Let's now take a look at some commercial artists and designers who were influenced by mid-20th Century abstractionism.

Mary Blair was an artist, designer and animator for Walt Disney Studios in the 1940's. She worked on many famous Disney productions during the Golden Age of Animation, including Cinderella and Alice in Wonderland, but she is most often mentioned nowadays for her design work on the Disney theme park ride "It's a Small World After All".

 Mary Blair has been credited with introducing modernist art styles to Walt Disney and his studio by using primary colors to form intense contrast and colors that are unnatural to the image they are depicting.

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Mary Blair also designed the Tomorrowland tile murals at Disneyland. Above you can see her standing before one of her concept sketches. Although her artwork depicts recognizable imagery, the influence of 20th Century abstract art on her work is undeniable. I particularly see a similarity between her colorful flat shapes and Kandinsky's abstract paintings from half a century earlier. 

Above are some of her concept sketches for the "Small World" ride at Disneyland. Her original idea was to use shapes from different types of architecture from all over the world. Notice how she deliberately chooses a different color scheme for each painting. 

Assignment:

Get into small groups of 4 or 5 students. Use the house templates below to create a paper city. Create buildings of various heights and forms by using the templates as modules and combining them. Consider building both out to the sides and up to create interesting and unique building designs with varied rooflines. 

Work collaboratively and cooperatively to create the most colorful, interesting, imaginative city that you can. Use Adobe Photoshop to decorate every side of every building you create. Experiment with different techniques. 

Please do not copy and paste photographs and images created by other artists onto your houses and skyscrapers. Instead, take the time to learn how to use Adobe Photoshop to create your own patterns and original designs.

 Experiment with filters, symmetry settings, blending modes, layering, and smearing colors. Adjust the hue and saturation of colors and use contrast to make your brightly colored designs pop off of the page. Consider creating a unified color scheme for each building, so that your designs look cohesive. 

If you do not have access to Adobe Photoshop, you can use the website Photopea instead. All my instructions for Adobe Photoshop should also work in Photopea.

I have created a video to give you some ideas and show you some techniques to get you started:

 

Once you have created your designs, upload them to Google Classroom. I will print them out for you on cardstock and then you can assemble them. We will then practice photographing them using lighting from various angles. Finally, we will try photographing your buildings in front of a green screen so we can remove the background and transport your work into various imaginary settings. We can even take photographs of each other and shrink ourselves down in Photoshop so that we can explore our abstract paper cities in person. 

The Templates:

Assignment 2:

If you are interested in complete abstraction and would prefer to decorate non-representational forms instead of houses, you can try the same lesson using this tetrahedron template instead:

Just decorate all the triangles using abstract designs. Create multiple versions with different designs or simply print out several copies of the sheet with the same designs onto cardstock. Assemble your three-dimensional tetrahedron forms and glue them together to invent brand new geometric shapes. Assemble groups of shapes on a table and set up interesting, dramatic lighting before photographing them.

Delete the background and use Photoshop to paste your sculptures into new background settings. Take a photograph of yourself and shrink yourself down in Photoshop so you can see how your sculpture would look on a grand scale in different settings.

How would your abstract geometric sculpture look hanging from the ceiling?

Below is are templates for a fold, cut, and glue tissue box design. Try using Adobe Photoshop to create abstract designs on the surface of your own original tissue box.