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Chapter 15 |
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Reading: reread Outline and Contour Line in Chapter 5; and Shape and Mass, and Three-dimensional Space in Chapter 6.
Premise: The word "camouflage" refers of course to the manner in which an animal or person disguises themselves to blend in with their environment. While there are many ways that this can happen (color change, pattern mimicking, etc.), the basic premise is that those species that can blend in with their environments are those which tend to survive. Supposing you were given an assignment to make a three-dimensional object blend in with its environment. How would you do it? How would it be convincing?
An effective way is to use pattern. In this assignment, you'll create a "tableau" background of a basic checkerboard grid, then make an object—a cube, a bottle, or some other solid object disappear inside of it.
Time to do this project: Allow twelve hours.
*Materials: any small object with a surface that will accept paint; acrylic gesso (a flat white canvas primer) if you plan to make an object such as a can or bottle disappear; black ink or poster paint; a paint brush—with a 3/16" round ferrule; and some 6-ply or 8-ply poster board or illustration board; X-acto® knife; 36" metal ruler; 2" package tape; small bottle or tube of white glue; pencil; a 16" wooden dowel rod with a small screw eye in one end; and a small block of styrofoam.
How to start: Rather than starting with the object, start by creating the background. To make the tableau environment, you need to cut three pieces that form a corner.
From a 32" x 40" piece of illustration board or poster board, mark out three 16" squares, *score the dotted lines, and cut the solid lines. If the board is gray on one side and white on the other, be sure to score the lines on the gray side! Your background is now a V-shaped board. With what you have leftover, you can carefully cut and assemble a 6" square cube which becomes your disappearing object, or, instead, you may choose to work with a bottle or other object.
*About scoring: scoring means that rather than cut all the way through the board with the knife, you only cut through half way. It allows you to bend the board evenly and cleanly along the scored line.
Now fold the 16" V at the scored lines, and when the edges of A and C meet, you suddenly have your background!
Design the pattern for the 16" background squares. While a grid is the easiest, you can be daring! Use curved lines, wavy lines, jagged lines—you can even use color should you choose. Use the pencil to draw the lines in, then fill in shapes with the large brush and black paint. Once you've filled in the solid areas, you can bend A and C up to where they meet and tape the back side of the corner with a continuous strip from bottom to top. The environment is done.
Prepare the object. It must be white or painted with gesso. You can paint the gesso on with the same brush (make sure it's clean). Let the object dry completely. Now for the hard part.
To make this work, you need to carry the design from the background across the surface of the object so that it appears continuous and seamless. This means you need to find a way to make 1) the object stationary, and 2) your eye stationary. Tape the edges of the environment to a desk or table top. Place the object in the environment and outline where it sits by tracing around it with the pencil. If it's a round object like a bottle or a cylinder, then put a mark on the bottom of the object that connects to a mark on the "floor" of the environment. This way you can always put the object back in the same position.
Making your eye stationary requires that you create a fixed position eyepiece. Look at the illustration on page 114. Dürer's Draftsman is using an obelisk point as a vanishing point. You'll use a dowel rod and a screw eye! To set it up, tape down the styrofoam block in front of the environment. One end of the dowel rod should be sharpened in a pencil sharpener, the flat end should have the screw eye screwed into it. Stick the dowel rod into the styrofoam block so that it is vertical to the table surface. The screw eye will establish a constant vantage point and the best viewing angle to have the object "disappear." The screw eye shold also be close enough to the object, that you can see and touch the object with both hands. If you cannot reach the object, move the styrofoam block closer to the environment.
Look through the screweye at the object, and draw lines on the object that start where the background lines end. If you used straight lines in the background, you'll need to follow a process of marking points on the object and draw the lines carefully while you hold the object in your hand (especially on a cylindrical object). Always return the object to the same place each time. After you've drawn in the lines, paint the gessoed object with the same black ink that you used in the background. You've now camouflaged the object, and from your vantage point, it should disappear!
Shaun Rance of Oregon State University did a variation of this project, working with primary colors. Below is Shaun's cube and environment together.
*About materials: All of these materials are available at craft stores, department stores such as Target or Wal-Mart, or college bookstores. You may already have them at home. You can also order the materials through Dick Blick, Inc.
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