One Black Square

I will post my final pieces first, and then explain my process.

These are my two thumbnails, the first one titled The Dusk and the second one titled The Dark Forest: 

Just like how the name indicates, the first one is a depiction of a setting sun above water. The top two blocks are the sun, both with some fragments on the outer side of the one fourth circle that can be interpreted as the blurry outlines of the silhouette or flying birds. The two bottom blocks are the reflection of the sun. The waves make the shapes linear and discontinuous instead of round.

The second one is inspired from a sci-fi The Three Body Problem. The top right block is a cut of three overlapping circles indicating the three stars. The bottom left block is a depiction of the dark forest, a theory of cosmo-sociology inside the book. The top left and bottom right parts are supposed to be like how high dimensional objects fall into low dimensions. For example, four dimensional objects fall into three dimensions. During the process, some objects lose their original shapes.

These are my two one-block pieces, one is the version of The Dusk and the other of The Dark Forest:

The Dusk has a similar logic to its thumbnail version, and I made The Dark Forest into a round shape because on the one hand, the warping surface from four dimensional space to three dimensional space is presented as a spherical shape in the book, just like how there are several soap bubbles on a piece of paper. On the other hand, I wanted to use the round outline and the sharp triangles inside to emphasize the tension of dimensionality reduction.

Just to clarify, these are how the fragments of the overlapping circles work:

Back to how I started all these, it was really difficult to ideate from nothing. The few restriction, such as the dimensions of the papers, allows a lot of freedom but also makes it difficult to narrow down my ideas. I tried to determine my themes first, and I finally went with dusk and The Three Body Problem among several other words that I brainstormed, and these are my original proposals that I created with GoodNotes:

I also gathered more inspirations over the weekend:

 

It took me a lot of time to actually execute these plans. Sometimes, I had to cut the pieces first and then test where to place them, and cutting the tiny pieces and using tweezers to glue them made me dizzy. Special thanks to my family :333 who inspired and helped me a lot during my design process of One Black Square!