This blog...

...was initially for pieces done on a computer, but has since become a free-for-all. Here you'll find process work (digital and otherwise), sketch pages and studies, sometimes with commentary.

You can see the rest of my work here.

Remember kids : if you can't make pretty designs, at least make pretty lines!

-Paul

Monday, February 13, 2012

Alphabet Soup

I once heard that all the cool, iconic ships in Star Wars were based on letters, the more obvious ones being the X-wing, Y-wing, etc.

It occurred to me that just about any from-scratch design could be born from random, modified letter shapes.  You can get a lot of mileage out of an "L" or an "I" when you flip, scale, rotate, mirror, extrude and skew the character into perspective multiple times.  What does an array of "A"s look like?  A bundle of "B"s? And what happens when you take a three letter word like COD or FAT or MAN and try to make something out of that?  Answer : infinite abstracts.


You're welcome.

1 comment:

Kurt Papstein said...

If you want to get super abstract, looking at foreign languages like ancient Thai writings could have some cool shapes as well. Just as long as they aren't too literal like Aztec hieroglyphs or something.

Great tips Paul, you're an amazing teacher :] Permission to share with the kids at LCAD?