PRIMARY TOOLS & MATERIALS:
CARVING/SHAPING + WACOM TABLET

Additional Tools & Materials: stock imagery, Adobe Photoshop

This letter illustrates the post-Macintosh work of New Wave designer April Greiman. In this study, I was tasked with carving and shaping with a drawing tablet. I decided to do the carving in the digital space, "shaping" letters from geometric structures and "carving" textures into the letters using my stylus - thereby digitizing the physical process, a technique Greiman helped pioneer as an early adopter of computer-assisted graphic design.

I began with a highly geometric, almost Escher-like black and white stock image. I saw in the image the potential for isolating shapes to form letters, and geometry played a huge part in much of Greiman's early work. I worked through various compositions and isolations of the shapes, at last defining this abstract, modular letter Q that's on the one hand, highly logical, but also difficult to read. After I established the letter, I tried various methods of digital manipulation - first "posterizing" an image of wood to make it look like "old" computer-generated graphics in Photoshop, then "carving" the letter out of the wood with layer styles and filters. Last, I made the letter red, set it against the geometric background, then used my Wacom and stylus to etch various halftone patterns onto the composition - another element common in Greiman's early digital work. This letter has the strange quality of being somehow modern yet retro.