

1750–after 1776) painted this image on a folding fan in ink, color and gold on paper. Using the archaic blue-and-green landscape style, Xu Yang (Chinese, active ca. Images of Daoist paradises were sometimes used for birthday gifts as it was given or used as a symbol of future success. This image shows an image of a Daoist paradise created in 18th century China. Xu Yang – Palaces of the Immortals dated 1753 Chinese Each shape has a specific value and you can see the variety in sizes. This painting done in 15th century Europe is a very early example of the organization of a subject into beautifully designed shapes. Master of the Grazie 1470-1490 Milan, church of Santa Maria delle Grazie The use of shape in art has a long history in both Eastern and Western art traditions. These shapes are less interesting History Of Shape In Art Painting is the same, but composed with shapes and colors instead of sounds. In music these sounds are called notes, and they are organized into scales, harmonies, and rhythms. Creating music is the process of organizing the incredible variety of sounds in nature into a logical arrangement of sound in which the sounds have an organized relationship to each other. It is this organization that creates a solid foundation for the painting.Ĭreating an interesting painting is not copying the confusion of colors in nature, but organizing them into patterns. This arranges the colors in the painting into a pattern of shapes, with a clear level of organization. Within one shape there may be several different warm and cool color differences, but each of these warm and cool colors has an identical value. Each shape is differentiated from the others by having a different value or saturation. These are the major shapes in the painting. Let us take a look at how this painting is divided into shapes. Here is a painting I did in Xinchang in China. Xinchang Old Bridge, by Barry John Raybould – 40cm x 50cm – Oil on Canvas – 2018 I generally use a combination of these two methods.

If you do not respect that pattern, your mountains will look as if they belong in a different place, and you will lose the poetry of that specific landscape. However it is more difficult because when you redesign the shapes you have to make sure that you do not lose the essential characteristics of the specific things you are painting.įor example, if you are painting mountains in a particular area, there is a specific pattern in the way the valleys and peaks of those mountains in those area are formed. Redesigning the shapes gives you more flexibility in your design. However you are still limited by the scene in front of you. crop the scene in order to make the shapes more interesting, orĬropping the scene is the simplest method, and allows you to get creative with your design by varying both the aspect ratio of the crop (the proportions of the height to width of the rectangle you use to crop the scene), or to zoom in or out of the scene.You can do one or the other, or do a combination of both methods. Generally this will also mean you will have to simplify the shapes. This means that if you want your work to have Visual Music, you need to edit the shapes we see in nature and redesign them from an artistic point of view. When you don’t know what the subject is, the end result, viewed as a graphic image with no meaning, is often not very interesting at all. The easiest way to see this is to turn a photograph upside down. However if you were to look at those shapes without knowing what the subject was, the inherent shape design of nature is often uninteresting. Together these shapes represent real things.

The visual appearance of nature is complicated and consists of a myriad of shapes. There are several principles you can follow to create good shape design in your paintings. In this structure, all the shapes fit together to cover the surface of the painting.
#Interesting shapes series
You can think of a painting as simply a two dimensional surface built from a series of shapes and combined into a mosaic-like structure. The essence of creating Visual Music in a painting is to design interesting shapes that intrigue and captivate the viewer. Shape in art is a flat two-dimensional area of color that has an identifiable edge or outline. A mosaic of shapes on a two dimensional surface
