Pablo Picasso was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer. he spent most of his adult life living in france. picasso is known as one of the most influential artists of recent time and is most notably known for co-founding the cubist movement. he is also well known for the invention of constructed sculpture and the co-invention of collage.

Picasso along with Henri Matisse and Marcel Duchamp are regarded as the three artists who most defined the development in the plastic arts, as well as being responsible for development in painting and sculpture.

picasso’s work interests me because of the shapes he used to turn very usual paintings, such as a group of musicians or a woman sitting down, into very abstract pieces which are much more exciting to look at. also he uses stronger more vibrant colours that are more fun and keep the viewer more interested in my opinion.

i think it will be very easy to get letters and maybe a font out of picasso’s work because lot’s of the shapes already look like letters, it will just take a little bit of smart thinking to create letters from the paintings.

Juan Gris was a Spanish painter and sculptor who lived in France for the majority of his life. his work, which is majorly linked to and described as cubist is among some of the most distinctive work to date.

Gris studied mechanical drawing in Madrid from 1902 to 1904, which is when he contributed drawings to local periodicals. From 1904 to 1905, he studied painting with the academic artist José Maria Carbonero.

In 1906 juan gris moved to Paris and befriended Henri Matisse and Georges Braque, all of whome also use a cubist style. in Paris, Gris followed in the footsteps of another friend, Pablo Picasso. Gris began to paint seriously in 1910, and by 1912 he had developed a personal Cubist style. His portrait of Picasso in 1912 is a significant early Cubist painting done by a painter other than Picasso or Braque.

like picasso’s work gris’ work inspires me because he uses images of very ordinary settings such as a table of instruments and completely changes them for the better, using his cubist style.

i think using this style and inspiration from gris will prove slightly more difficult than it will of picasso, but i still think i will be able to come up with some cool images, letters and possibly a typeface.

Georges Braque was an extremely popular French painter and sculptor in the 20th century. he, along with Pablo Picasso, introduced the world to the art style known as Cubism.

georges grew up in Le Havre, france and trained to become a house painter and decorator like his father and grandfather before him, however he also studied artistic painting during the evenings from about 1897 to 1899.

In Paris, he was an apprentice to a decorator and was awarded his certificate in 1902. a year later, he at-tended the Académie Humbert, and painted there until 1904. It was here that he metMarie Laurencin and Francis Picabia.

i really like the work of braque for a very contrasting reason that i enjoy picasso’s and gris’ work. the other two artists use bold and stand-out colours, but braque seems to prefer using earthy tones.

georges uses lots of straight lines in his work, so i think it will be very easy to create letters and characters from his artwork.

to create these letters, i drew the letter ‘t’ out onto a piece of A4 paper, i then proceeded to tear the paper into strips.

i rearanged the paper so that the letters looked abstract and had more of a cubist feel.

i feel that the lower letter has more potential as it is much more legible, the first is still legible, but i think it is on the line between abstract and just stupid.

to create these letters, i drew the letters out onto post-it-notes.

i rearanged the notes so that the letters looked abstract and had more of a cubist feel.

i much prefer the ‘a’ in this case. as it is more interesting, but your still able to read it perfectly fine.

dada was an art movement in the early 20th century. It began in Switzerland in 1916, and quickly spread to Berlin shortly after.

Dada came out of bad reaction to the horrors of World War I. Dada rejected reason and logic, prizing nonsense, irrationality and intuition. The origin of the name Dada is unclear; some believe that it is a nonsensical word.

i think dada is a perfect way to follow on from cubism, as it uses many of the same shapes and geometry, as some of the artists mentioned in the cubist section.

when i look at work from the dada movement it reminds me of propaganda, which is probably fitting as it came about due to a bad reaction to world war I.

Futurism was an artistic and social movement originating in Italy in the early 20th century. it explored themes associated with thoughts and concepts of the future, including speed, technology, youth and violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane and cities. It was largely an Italian thing, though there were similar movements in Russia and england.

i like futuristic work as it explores objects and shapes new to us and often uses adventurous colours which are really interesting.

i have very much followed in the cubist style as i think that these futurism images are very similar to those of georges braque.

Born in Augusta, Georgia, Jasper Johns spent his early life in South Carolina with his grandparents after his parents’ marriage failed. He then spent a year living with his mother and thereafter he spent several years living with his aunt Gladys in Lake Murray, South Carolina, twenty-two miles from Columbia.

Johns is best known for his painting ‘Flag’, which he apprently painted after having a dream about the American flag. His work is often described as ‘Neo-Dadaist’, as opposed to pop art, even though his subject matter often includes images and objects from popular culture. Still, many compilations on pop art include Jasper Johns as a pop artist because of his artistic use of classical iconography.

I really like Johns’ work mainly because of the media he uses, i really like acrylic paint and think that the texture makes it look so much better than a lot of other medias. i think i will try to cre-ate a font using johns’ style.

Starting in 1929, Nevelson studied art full-time with Kenneth Hayes Miller and Kimon Nicolaides as her teachers at the Art Students League.

Nevelson said that an exhibition of Noh kimonos at the Metropolitan Museum of Art encouraged her to study art further.

In 1931 she sent her son Mike to live with her family and travelled to Europe. she paid for the trip by selling a diamond bracelet that her now ex-husband had given her on the occasion of Mike’s birth. In Munich she studied with Hans Hofmann before visiting Italy and France. Returning to New York in 1932.

i felt that i had concentrated far too much on cubism and the artists that have very similar styles. on second glance, nevelsons’ work is rather cubist too.

i like the fact that nevelson spent hours creating these pieces out of wood, and that they stood upto 20 feet tall.

Constructivism was an artistic style that originated in Russia around 1919. it was a rejection of the idea of autonomous art. The movement was in promoted of art as a practice for social purposes. Constructivism had a great effect on modern art movements of the 20th century, influencing major trends such as Bauhaus. Its influence was pervasive, with major impacts upon architecture, graphic and industrial design, theatre, film, dance, fashion and to some extent music.

i really liked researching russian constructivism, as i thought that each image had a powerful message. its almost as if the artists are protestingwith every image. i also like the colours, in almost all of the images i found on russian constructivism, the colours red and black were used, these colours represent anger and power.

i think i chose to look at constructivism because it was quite different to the cubist movements i had previoisly looked at, yes lots of shapes are used, but they dont alter images to give them an abstract look.

i think id like to try and create a font with this movement in mind because i think it could lead me somewhere good.

i really liked the russian constructivism work so i decided to look at it further, i tried to create some fonts andletterings that might look good. and i think the one directly above this text is quite effective. i like the colour scheme used, red and a dark grey, the colours contrast nicely and make the text really easy to read.

im going to use this influence when creating one of my typefaces for definate. mainly because i think it will be simple, but still have a strong message, and most of all will be very easy to read, my previous research however into cubism, might see me creating a font that is rather difficult to actually read and probably would make an everyday font to be used when typing essays.

these are a collection of front covers already used by the font bureau for their specimen books. i think that these covers are really nicely done, the simplicity behind them is amazing, and the fact that they can make them so simple yet they still have a meaning is really nice. id like to think that my cover will be simplistic, yet encapsulate some deeper meaning that viewers would want to work out.

gris || FONT BUREAU

font bureautype specimens

font bureautype specimens

font bureautype specimens

font bureautype specimens

after trying many different colour varia-tions, i think that i prefer the green one. i think that it brings an essence of earthli-ness to the cover, which will contrast brilliantly with the font that i created.