#susan s. szenasy

[miamaimania]

"Tranquil Oasis" from LIGHT by Susan S. Szenasy ©1986

[lostfunzones]

From "Light: The Complete Handbook of Lighting Design," Susan S. Szenasy, 1986.

[cocainaenvenenada]

Light, Susan S. Szenasy, 1986.

[unsubconscious]

From "Light : The Complete Handbook of Lighting Design" by Susan S Szenasy 

[jpegfantasy]

the home, susan s. szenasy, 1985  📚

salvaged & scanned by @jpegfantasy 🖨️

[saint-vagrant]

You have a wonderful understanding of light and shadow and how they interact with your environments and characters. Do you have any good reference or starting points in regards to learning those foundations? I find the manipulation of light to be very intimidating. Thank you and your work is lovely!

hi! thank you for thinking so, and for the kind words! this stuff still feels new to me even after doing it for years– there’s always more to learn, which is pretty exciting. 

(colour is light, and, at least in academia, they’re often wrongly separated when it comes to teaching illustration. the easiest way for me to talk about lighting is to refer to it in terms of/how it affects colour relationships, so i hope you don’t mind that approach.)

first up, i always want to recommend my man James Gurney. he is very accessible and down to earth, loves talking and sharing, makes books that aren’t Dinotopia. he uses a variety of media, and one of them is gouache, which is the only paint i use for traditional media (if that’s of any interest to you.) from Gurney Journey, his blog:

what helped me too wasn’t just collecting examples of lighting in fun visual art, but buying books like “The Best in Lobby Design: Hotels & Offices (1991)” to see how a space is created and lit and read how the designers thought about and made it that way. just having a starting off point like that informs a whole space, the drama of it, and how to drop people into it and be affected by that lighting.

the above passages are about “coating with light”, and all this is in reference to putting together a home, but i think it can speak to (my) illustration process as well:

“The resulting light creates an incredible ambiance [re: placing a small piece of turquoise neon in a white-walled room] No matter where it was, the walls looked as if they were painted turquoise.  The colour comes from the glass, not the gas.  When white glass is used, however, the choice of gas does make a difference, because neon casts a warm light whereas argon’s cast is cooler.”

“The colour that coats a room from a neon source may be deceptively different from the colour of the fixture itself. A neon sculpture that includes the colours of the rainbow, for instance, will cast a white light, which is the additive sum of all the colours. On the other hand, a yellow piece will cast a yellow light that complements a room with a sunny disposition.”

from LIGHT, by Susan S. Szenasy

when it comes to doing your own studies, in general i think it’s sort of the same as approaching any other new material. using it. studying how light, as an artistic tool, actually works, the techniques for how it’s manipulated in real life (with film/photography, the use of gels, diffusion techniques, what colours and even textures/materials more absorb/reflect, refract, scatter, matte/gloss, dual lighting, how/where dimmer light is drowned out by brighter light) gave me a more physical understanding of something that is inherently intangible, and helped supply a vocabulary necessary to even begin searching for reference. 

example: terms like “golden hour” and “blue hour” (those pretty times of day where the longer red rays pass through scattered blue light, the light being indirect and more diffused.)

i edit my own photos, looking at film footage before and after colour editing, and simplifying the shapes to get the essentials. a lot of lighting depends on hardness/softness of shapes and edges, and the right contrast of not just dark/light, but differing saturation/vibrance. when referencing from film it’s important to look at before/after shots and your own photos in comparison– film lighting and colour-grading is largely meant to convince you of an experience narratively/thematically rather than hyperrealistically. even neon gets boosted in the editing process, and landscape painters emphasise atmospheric perspective to push the space between foreground/middle/back. 

edits of one of my photos:

i get a lot of use out of the mosaic/crystallize/cut paper filters in PS to find the basic colour relationships and pull out a palette. colour relationships and interplay of vibrancy matters more than true/black white, and there often isn’t any, or something like a dark green feels more natural.

these are from a long Patreon post related to this topic:

(blade runner)

(happy together)

there’s a lot of concepts there to take on, and i think the real struggle is learning to eventually strip it down to the essentials. at least, since my comic work is pretty cartooned, simplifying those big, easily-noodled with concepts was actually harder when it comes/came to imparting all the important information through abstraction, letting go of obsession with detail. distance, light/colour, etc. are as much compositional tools as anything else– too many competing elements of equal detail and no clear indication of where to look can make the viewer dizzy. that doesn’t mean every piece is like, a lighter figure on a black or blurred backdrop, but rather, there’s all kinds of patterns and landmarks that can guide the viewer around. what do you want them to see, what do you want them to feel?

the figure here is very low-contrast, but also has way more detail than the brighter neon. it doesn’t matter what the pink sign behind their shoulder says (there’s all sorts of other imagery here to figure out the vibe) what matters is the pink light is hitting their face and arms and guiding you (i hope) to solid ground.

i don’t know if that’s helpful, but i hope it gives you a starting point if just in how to think about breaking down the concepts. i’m not sure what you might be going for or what artists you like, but i having looked at your work (killer btw) I might recommend Tsukasa Hojo/Izumi Matsumoto/Yukio Kitta’s illustrations paired with Tsai Ming-Liang’s Rebels of the Neon God or the sweet candy palette of The Florida Project?

my inspiration/reference boards are always full of seemingly-disparate things (recently: Book of Kells, clear acrylic nails, bondage, peonies, neon altars from Vietnam...) it’s all about finding and consciously articulating what you love, and finding it in places you never expected, and mashing it together.i’m always collecting references and have a lighting inspiration tag here!)

[supremeinteriors]

LIGHT The Complete Handbook of Lighting Design | Susan S. Szenasy ©1986

[clairestewartdesign]

Design Thinking Blog Post 4

I really enjoyed watching Design & Thinking. It was informative and engaging, and I liked hearing from a variety of designers and different perspectives. The designers in this film were mostly central in their opinions when they spoke of design thinking, which I found aligned with my own ideas about it much more than the previous articles and videos we have responded to.

In the movie, Susan S. Szenasy said that 21st century design thinking should be collaborative, technically informed, historically and culturally connected, and environmentally aware. I love this approach because interdisciplinary design really resonates with me. My best and most fulfilling work has happened when I’ve worked with people from other areas of expertise.

The idea that many designers enter the discipline after being highly analytically trained resonated with me because that is how I felt when I came into the graphic design program after high school. My entire schooling up to that point had been focussed on getting the right answer to any given question. The process of iteration and trying lots of things — and being okay when things don’t work out — was a steep learning curve. It is something that I still struggle with even though I know how important it is.

Finally, a key concept I pulled from the movie is that design is the act of seeing something we want to be better followed by the act of making it better. It’s about asking the right questions to figure out what the best solution to any given problem is. “Why?” is a driving force behind a designer’s approach.

[cooperhewitt]

MARK CHAMBERS HONORED WITH DIRECTOR’S AWARD AT 20TH NATIONAL DESIGN AWARDS GALA

Mark Chambers Honored with Director’s Award at 20th National Design Awards Gala

New Climate Action Award Announced for 2020

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum held its 20th annual National Design Awards Gala in New York City last evening, honoring design excellence and innovation in 12 categories. The Director’s Award, which was revealed live, was presented to Mark Chambers, Director of Sustainability for the City of New York. This year’s Gala included the announcement of the Climate Action Award, a new category beginning in 2020, which will recognize a design project for its significant contributions to addressing the global climate crisis.

The evening honored all of the 2019 National Design Award winners: Susan Kare, Lifetime Achievement; Patricia Moore, Design Mind; MIT D-Lab, Corporate & Institutional Achievement; Thomas Phifer, Architecture Design; Tobias Frere-Jones, Communication Design; Derek Lam, Fashion Design; Ivan Poupyrev, Interaction Design; IwamotoScott Architecture, Interior Design; SCAPE, Landscape Architecture; Tinker Hatfield, Product Design; and Open Style Lab, Emerging Designer. The recipients of these juried National Design Awards were previously announced.

Caroline Baumann, director of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, presented the Director’s Award to Chambers. As Director of Sustainability for the City of New York, Chambers leads the design and development of policies and programs to enable a resilient, zero-carbon built environment and a fair, healthy future for all 8.6 million residents of the largest city in the United States. This future vision is laid out in the citywide strategic plan, OneNYC 2050. In 2019, Chambers spearheaded the world’s first mandated cap on greenhouse gas emissions from large buildings, which will usher in an era of high performance design throughout New York City to fight climate change. Previously, Chambers served as the Director of Sustainability and Energy for Washington, D.C., where he helped execute Washington’s Sustainable DC strategic plan and negotiated the nation’s largest municipal wind power purchase agreement at the time.

“Mark is paving the path toward a greener future by creating essential awareness of both the footprint we have as a big city, and the impact New York City can have as a leader and a champion of a vibrant and inclusive future for the planet,” Baumann said. “His life work is perfectly aligned with Cooper Hewitt’s core belief that design has the power to address humanity’s challenges, from the everyday to the monumental. I am absolutely delighted to honor Mark with this year’s Director’s Award.”

Chambers joins a distinguished group of previous Director’s Award winners, including Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation; Susan S. Szenasy, director of design innovation, former publisher and editor in chief of Metropolis (2017); Make It Right, a nonprofit organization, founded by Brad Pitt in 2007, that builds homes, buildings and communities for people in need (2016); and Jack Lenor Larsen, an internationally renowned textile designer, author and collector (2015).

National Design Awards is made possible by generous support from Target.

Additional support is provided by Design Within Reach, Facebook and Bloomberg Philanthropies.

National Design Award trophies are created by The Corning Museum of Glass.

ndagallery.cooperhewitt.org is powered by Behance, part of Adobe, Inc.

ABOUT THE NATIONAL DESIGN AWARDS

Launched at the White House in 2000 as an official project of the White House Millennium Council, the annual awards recognize design in various disciplines as a vital humanistic tool in shaping the world.

The Gala serves as the centerpiece of National Design Week, which features a series of programs for all audiences led by award winners, including hands-on workshops, lighting design talks, in-gallery experiences, a design career fair and educator open house. In celebration of the 20th anniversary of the National Design Awards, Target will offer free admission to visitors of Cooper Hewitt through Oct. 19, making design accessible to all.

ABOUT COOPER HEWITT

Cooper Hewitt is America’s design museum. Inclusive, innovative and experimental, the museum’s dynamic exhibitions, education programs, master’s program, publications and online resources inspire, educate and empower people through design. An integral part of the Smithsonian Institution—the world’s largest museum, education and research complex—Cooper Hewitt is located on New York City’s Museum Mile in the historic, landmark Carnegie Mansion. Steward of one of the world’s most diverse and comprehensive design collections—over 210,000 objects that range from an ancient Egyptian faience cup dating to about 1100 BC to contemporary 3-D-printed objects and digital code—Cooper Hewitt welcomes everyone to discover the importance of design and its power to change the world. Cooper Hewitt knits digital into experiences to enhance ideas, extend reach beyond museum walls and enable greater access, personalization, experimentation and connection. The museum is fully accessible.

For more information, visit www.cooperhewitt.org or follow @cooperhewitt on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

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  from Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum https://ift.tt/31paCMx via IFTTT

[int0design]

jpegfantasy: The Home, Susan S. Szenasy, 1985 📚 Salvaged &... http://creativehouses.tumblr.com/post/183650320044

[dynamicdata]

Light, Susan S. Szenasy, 1986

via: she_comes_in_technicolor

[narcissistpuppy]

📷 jpegfantasy: The entrance of a southern California bungalow. Light, Susan S. Szenasy, 1986. Scanned by @jpegfantasy https://t.co/l5405SAKG4 https://ift.tt/1Aj5Sr4

[unsubconscious]

From ‘Light: The Complete Handbook of Lighting Design’ by Susan S. Szenasy, 1986 

[jpegfantasy]

the home, susan s. szenasy, 1985  📚

salvaged & scanned by @jpegfantasy 🖨️

[paulinecopymoodboard]

The Home, Susan S. Szenasy, 1985