Part 2: Ideas - turning words into pictures

For this exercise we were asked to select a word from a given list and to draw everything that comes to mind without concern for the accuracy of the drawing or the prettiness of it.

These quick drawings at the early stage of the design process are for ideas generation and not generally for others to see.

I chose to draw the word kitchen.

I started the first page of drawings too carefully I think - trying to make each one look right. But I managed to become less meticulous and drew quick ideas rather than accurate drawings, and started to group similar ideas together.

I had a look at some learning blogs of other students to see what they had done for this exercise.

It was very interesting to see similarities between theirs and mine, plus I discovered some good ideas to try. One student had done some textural rubbings from their kitchen - so I decided to have a go at that.

Using a kitchen material (cooking foil) I rubbed the surface of items such as cooking utensils, the textured surface of a non-stick baking tin and wall tiles which achieved some kind of a 3-dimensional effect.

One student described this exercise as creating a visual spider diagram - I think that's a good description.

I then went on to create a second page of kitchen drawings.

This time I think I was more successful. The drawings were made more quickly and simply as I moved about the page to record and expand on ideas as they occurred to me.