Reductive Design/City Stamp Project

This project started as an introduction into simplifying forms and reductive design. We picked a city that we had vacationed to within the last year, and selected pictures that represented that city visually. Boston was the city I chose. Like many of our projects, we started in black and white, and by hand, to focus first on creating strong compositions. Once we narrowed down our two strongest directions, we then moved to the computers and began to work digitally. The biggest challenge this project posed was reducing an image to its bare bones, but still being identifiable as something so iconic to that particular city. Year - 2015

The final display of my two stamps representing the city of Boston. The left being the iconic gazebo at the Boston Harbor Hotel at Rowes Wharf. The right representing a rower in the Head of The Charles Regatta, which occurs every October on the Charles River in Cambridge. The final format included our working size (3 in. x 4 in.) and actual stamp size (3/4 in. x 1 in.) when printed.
A horizontal direction in earlier iterations of the rower stamp.
A zoomed in look at the final version of the rower stamp.
A zoomed in look at the final version of the gazebo stamp.
Below are the drawings done by hand in the early stages of the project. Using Micron, ink, and gouache paint each of the forms is reduced in their own respective way. The rower was done using only lines, the sperm whale was meant to show relation to its background, the Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge showcased geometric shapes to create the form, and finally the gazebo used shape and negative space to create the composition.
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