Final Stamp Design -- Zivia

At the beginning of this project, we were asked to brainstorm some words the describe ourselves and then choose three main ones to focus on. The three words I chose were creative, Integrity (integrous), and loving. While these are not the only words I would use to describe myself, they are some of the more powerful words. We then had to turn these words into images in our heads and then into a sketch. For this, I drew a lot of inspiration from my name, which means doe (a female deer) in Hebrew. Does stay with their young for about 200 day, which is around 28 ½ weeks. While this may seem short to us, this is a lot longer than most in the animal kingdom. This animal fulfilled my hopes for the word loving.

For the word integrous, I chose to add a wing to my deer. Integrity is about having a strong moral backbone to be able to rise above selfishness and immaturity. Birds, despite having thin, hollow bones, are able to catch wind currents and fly above our capitalist and fraught society and see the beautiful whole. While I am not free of these strains, I do feel that integrity is one of my core values and the wing carries my hopes for truth and justice forward.

As for the word creativity, drawing and writing are my strongest passions and those both start with a pencil. WIth a pencil you can create worlds and character, images and music. A whole new dimension opens when one picks up a pencil. When one can tap into this dimension for a time, I feel they are truly creative.

However, the main images and their positive space (main focus) are one of two aspects of my piece. The negative space around them plays a key part in bring the image to life. In my stamp, negative space was used in three ways: as a background, as an outline, and as an accent. The first is the most obvious as it is found behind the image. The yellow deer has a black background, which is the absence of focus in the image. This then makes the main image pop. As for the outline aspect, negative space turned my pencil sketch lines into shapes. It helped to show the individual feathers of the wing, and differentiate between the deer and the vine circle encompassing her. Finally the accent aspect. This is mostly found in the deer’s face and the veins in the leaves. Negative space allowed me to add in the detail of the eye, nose, jaw bone and eyebrow. Without this lack of positive space, these details would have been lost, causing the deer to looks more like a blobby silhouette then an actual creature.

The last thing I want to touch on is the process of seeing negative and positive space. I didn’t really need to learn to understand it, as seeing it has just been an innate thing I do.  But anyway, when it comes to seeing and then using negative and positive space there is, while not a process, a flip. Yes, negative space is used to make the positive pop, but at times there is a flip when negative space becomes a main focus, and therefore becomes positive space. Looking at the eye, to reference the deer's face again, we know there is something there. That is not an empty socket. Yet, I used negative space to show the eyelid and lashes and it works. You know there is an eye there. This flip is my process, and it allows me to give both positive and negative space other definitions and uses.