visual problem solving | Migration Story

Our top question: How do you create an image to match your image with your message?

Our goal for our students and curriculum:

to learn how to dissect and image
to learn how to work backwards from a goal, to find the right images to represent your concept

Breaking Visual Problem Solving into Workshops

The “practical” side: Image Composition

1 workshop focused on Image Composition. We studied examples of different techniques artists used to weight or draw the viewers’ focus through the piece. We created our own compositions from still life objects. Each student received two objects to use as reference and had to try and come up with a composition that conveyed an “opposite” sense of what the object was. How do you draw a feather to look heavy? A small bauble to look large? A stable, symmetrical container to look off balance?

Here are some of the results.

AWE-Escuela-Verde-student-drawings_0002 — Drawing using a a sunflower and eagle brooch for reference, by Isabel Castro.

AWE-Escuela-Verde-student-drawings_0001 — Drawing of a jar on the edge of the table, by German Vasquez.

The “creative” side: Image to Concept

We did a number of different exercises and games to flex our creative skills, including:

Doodle Wars and improvisation
Identifying metaphors and common themes through sharing our own immigration stories
Studying the metaphors in existing artworks
Studying how different murals have incorporated the wall itself into the design
Researching different subjects related to our theme of immigration.

We ultimately chose to incorporate different migratory butterflies and crops that are grown in Wisconsin into our final imagery.

process-09 — Our list of different migratory species of butterflies and crops that grow in Wisconsin.

escuela-verde_0003 — One of the students’ thumbnail sketches of different possible compositions.

escuela-verde_0006 — A composite sketch by student Isabel Castro of crops grown by different cultures in Wisconsin, with different roots.

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Talking about our concepts is one thing. But how do you translate words into image? Where do you even begin?

We spent a day exercising our creative chops and spontaneity. We started with the improv game, “Yes, and…” Good improvisation depends on trust, and the purpose of the game is to foster collaboration. The rule is that whatever your partner throws down as a prompt, you follow with, “Yes, and…” to continue building the scene. If you disagree with your partner and kill their prompt, you effectively end the scene and the story.

Translating that same idea into image, we played the drawing game, Doodle Wars. Everyone draws on the same large sheets of paper, and every minute, a timer goes off and you have to move to another spot and create a new drawing in response to what somebody else has already put down. The goal is to be quick, keep moving, and keep expanding upon the scenes that already exist.

process-04