Martina Acosta
Yin Yang
Class of: 2025
Major: Strategic Design and Management BBA
Medium: Illustrator
Faculty: Susan Stillman
Prompt: In Illustrator, create a composition that combines your original invented forms with your pen tool tracings of your organic shapes to enhance the spatial illusions you are creating. Decide on a light source direction and fill the facets of your forms in keeping with that source. Take your composition and make two versions. Use both color and value to create 2 entirely different moods in each.
I created various invented forms. I started out by making shapes in Illustrator, with no real purpose. After I had a few on my page, I began to arrange them to create a deep composition, one that generated a sense of space through scale change, transparency, value range, and cropping. Later, I added the organic forms which were my interpretation of a mushroom. I placed them around the forms, as well as overlapping in the middle. I then added the colors, where I chose the complementary pair of green and purple, and for the second version, the analogous trio of yellow- orange, red-orange, and red.
This project forced me to combine elements that I would have never imagined to be paired together. The concept of yin and yang explains dualism. It shows how two forces that are opposite can actually complement each other. When I added the organic forms into my composition, they started to create rhythm and blend very nicely. The combination of the hard- edged shapes with the curved mushrooms bring more attention to each object, generating balance within the piece. The same happens with the color combinations. The green and purple create stark contrast with the red-orange version. Both pieces create a sense of chaos and explosion, which is made up from the dualism between elements.
