How To Tie A Shoe

In doing the "how to" assignment my first issue was deciding on what idea i was going to produce. The example online was how to make a pizza which I thought was pretty simple and i wanted to do something else. My first ideas were how to juggle a soccer ball, how to cast a fishing pole, and how to swing a baseball bat. These three ideas I decided however would be to difficult for me to draw with my lack of artistic ability. I then came up with the idea of how to tie a shoe. It is something that everyone does everyday so everybody should be able to recognize what a shoe looks like without it being labeled. Point of view was an issue for me. I had to find a point of view to draw from where the laces could clearly be seen. A birds eye view ended up being the best option. Also when tying a shoe, the laces need to be overlapped and knotted, etc and i knew this was going to be a challenge to make visually. People need to see exactly where the laces are and the formations they are in if they are going to be able to successfully tie a shoe from my graphical instructions. To solve this issue I color coded the shoe laces I was drawing. I made one red and one green so that both the colors would grab the viewers eye. I know that a lot of people (children) have been taught by their parents, friends, or teachers to use a "bunny ears" method of tying a shoe. I wanted to incorporate this into my design. When it came to the step of creating the bunny ear shapes with the laces I also drew the head of a bunny with the ears in the same shape as the laces. When one of the laces is then looped around the other, I also drew the bunny ears doing the same motion. Because we were not allowed to use words I decided the best way to show that the laces needed to be pulled in opposite directions from each other would be to use arrows sense that is a fairly universal symbol. When my basic structure was complete, i wanted to make it more visually appealing as a whole while not taking away from or complicating any of the visual communication. I used I think a total of four colors in my assignment. I felt like this would keep things simple. I wanted it to be simple because anytime you are trying to learn a new thing, it makes it easier if it is in simple terms. Also, i felt four colors would be enough to make the entire assignment pleasing to the eyes. I chose bright colors with lots of contrast. Overall I think it came out all right but I won't know until someone tries to tie a shoe based on my assignment.