Project #1: Silhouette/Pictograph to Ideograph

This project will introduce Adobe Illustrator software. You will learn how to use the pen, rectangle, path-finder, and direct selection tools. You will learn how to define a path, anchor point, direction handle, stroke, and fill. This assignment will help you define and use positive and negative space, you will under-stand the use and define a silhouette, pictograph and ideograph.

What is a Pictograph? Early writing used simple drawings to represent objects called picto-graphs. Pictographs are the simplified drawings of objects. Early pictographs identified contents of vessels, indicate ownership by using a series of marks. These marks could represent people, places, and things, but are not effective for communicating complex and abstract ideas, emotions, concepts and actions. Modern examples of pictographs indicate gender separate facilities, eating areas, no parking or parking zones etc. These pictographs are vital in communicating important universal simple meaning in the absence of common language.

The combination of two pictographs, an ox and a mountain range, results in an ideagraph meaning “wild ox”.

Contemporary pictographs and ideographs communicate simple messages across multiple languages and cultures.

From pictographs to ideographs. As Picto-graphs are assigned meaning that went beyond a simple visual representation they where trans-formed into ideographs. An ideograph is the combination of of two or more pictographs to represent an idea. For example, the pictograph of a hand can be changed to an ideograph when it is combined with other simples to convey the concepts of “to give”, “to greet”, “to offer”, or “to take”.

Ideographs combine pictographs to communicate more complex concepts and messages

Kara Walker

What is a Silhouette? The dark shape and outline of someone or something visible against a lighter background. A representation of someone or something showing the shape and outline only, typically colored in solid black.

Assignment: Using Adobe illustrator draw original silhouettes of two objects or pictographs. Then com-bine these two pictographs to create and ideograph with content, meaning and requiring interpretation. You may work from photographs you download from free images web-site or take your own photographs.

DOCUMENT SIZE: Letter Size, 11”x 8.5”INK: Black

Kara Walker is a contemporary artist who uses silhouettes and ideographs in her work. She is best known for exploring the raw intersection of race, gender, and sexuality through her iconic, silhouetted figures. Walker unleashes the traditionally proper Victorian medium of the silhouette directly onto the walls of the gallery, creating a theatrical space in which her unruly cut-paper characters fornicate and inflict violence on one another. In works like “Darkytown Rebellion” (2000), the artist uses overhead projectors to throw colored light onto the ceiling, walls, and floor of the exhibition space; the lights cast a shadow of the viewer’s body onto the walls, where it mingles with Walker’s black-paper figures and landscapes. With one foot in the historical realism of slavery and the other in the fantastical space of the romance novel, Walk-er’s nightmarish fictions simultaneously seduce and implicate the audience. Please research her work further.

Examples of Silhouettes: