Your assignment is to produce a design for a mural on a 9 x 24" sheet of paper. (an 18 x 24", cut in half the long way) You may surround your image with a one inch border, or not.
The design should contain three separate areas of focus. In the painting by Thomas Hart Benton that we analyzed in class, the focal areas are planned around three vertical poles. The card game and cowboys with rifles are arranged on the central axis. The band and dancers are arranged around an axis to the left, and the cowboys breaking horses are arranged along an axis to the right. These groups are each arranged along structural lines. In this painting the structural lines are mostly curves, but our eyes can be led around an image by straight lines as well. I recommend that you start planning your design by playing around with abstract lines and shapes and seeing what images they suggest to your mind. The theme of the mural can be anything-- cowboys, a political revolution, robots. Anything!
The real challenge of this assignment will be to relate the different focal areas of your mural to one another. I'd like you to keep our work with positive and negative shapes in mind. You're not just drawing things! You're drawing lines and shapes that should have a particular visual character. Plan out your design using pencil, and finish it with ink. You may use a pen, a sharpie felt-tip marker, or a brush, but the design should include both areas of white and black shapes. I will display these assignments next to your postitive-negative designs from two weeks ago, to compare whether the overall design is visually interesting when viewed from a distance, so you should judge your own work by taking a step back from it every now and then. 