Moving the Eye through 2-D Design: A Visual Primer

Moving the Eye Through 2-D Design A Visual Primer

Buy Shaver

First published in the UK in 2011 by

Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol. BS16 3JG, UK

First published in tile USA in 2011 by

Intellect, The university of Chicago Press, 14Z7 E. 60th Street,

Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2011 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted. in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written perrmission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All illustrations credited with name only were created by students.

Illustrations without credits were created by the author.

Cover designer: Holly Rose

Copy-editor: Danielle Styles

Typesetting: Mac Style, Beverley, E. Yorkshire, UK

ISBN 978-1-84150-363-9 / EISBN 978-84150-439-1

Printed and bound by Cambrian Printers, Aberystwyth, UK.

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1: Visual Dynamics

Chapter 2: Line

Chapter 3: Shape

Chapter 4: Value and Depth

Chapter 5: Visual Interest

Chapter 6: Colour

Chapter 7: Feeling

Chapter 8: Colour Systems

Introduction

Idon’t quite remember when I began to teach using the method that I have described in this book. I know that it has developed incrementally over the past fifteen years. Since 1990 I have taught at a number of Philadelphia area art institutions, instructing students in drawing, painting (both watercolour and experimental), installation art and two-dimensional design.

By the time my daughter was born in 2001, I was regularly teaching a first-year college course on the basic elements of two-dimensional design. At the introductory level, the visual arts are typically separated into three categories – drawing, two-dimensional design, and three-dimensional design or sculpture. Two-dimensional design, the focus of this book, is the study of the basic elements – line, shape, value, texture, motion, depth and colour. These are the components of any artwork created on a flat surface such as a page or canvas. In two-dimensional design you learn how to create the basic elements and how their relationships to each other and to the picture plane, affect the composition’s feeling or meaning.

For example, if an image of a tiger is rendered realistically, photographically or in a simplified manner as in a logo, the tiger will be perceived differently in each version. And the tiger’s relationship to the other elements, whether it be alone against a green background, crouching at the top of a composition or one of many tigers moving across the page, will each affect the composition’s feeling or meaning. Is the tiger ferocious, meek or majestic? Generally, it is not just one element but the combination of many elements and how they relate to each other and to the picture plane that evoke feeling.

Any two-dimensional composition or design – a photograph, painting, drawing, magazine or web page – is dependent on the ability to create and control these various relationships. And in order to understand the complexity of these relationships, you must understand the individual elements – line, shape, value, texture, motion, depth and colour.

Typically, most first-year courses focus on one element at a time. For instance, students learn process and vocabulary of line, then move on to shape. To ensure that each element is discussed, courses often amount to a brief introduction to the fundamental skills and the concepts behind them.

For example, with line, students are often taught how to make lines – straight and curved, thin and thick – using various tools such as pencils (hard to soft) and pens (markers, technical and ruling). Much time and energy is spent learning the process of creating painterly lines, evenly spaced lines, and lines that are crisp and mechanical. This approach develops the hand skills inherent in freehand and mechanical mark-making. However, too little time is devoted to understanding the complex relationships between the basic elements, which affect how a composition is perceived. So when students are required to apply lines to their own work, they typically do not have a clear understanding of how to proceed. The students revert back to making art as they had done in the past and their work does not progress.

Understanding and developing these skills is important, but there hasn’t been an easy-to-understand and widely accepted approach to connect these skills to each other and to the art-making process as a whole. Beyond teaching a work ethic inherent in the acquisition of these hand skills, what are we doing with line? How do you use line to clarify a composition’s feeling or meaning?

In many university and college art programmes, the basic elements are taught to students who are interested in a wide variety of art practices – painting, graphic design, industrial design, photography, film-making, illustration and printmaking, to name a few. In addition, first-year college students have various skill sets. Some are proficient in the hand skills required of drawing and painting, and some are better acquainted with photography and film-making. So I wondered: how do these hand skills help a student to become a better graphic designer when they could use a computer to produce a crisp, mechanical line more efficiently? How does line, for example, pertain to photography? What must each student know about the basics to guarantee success in their various future endeavors?

I was determined to connect what I was teaching directly to the process of making art. I wanted my students to learn the basic skills and concepts in order to build a clear understanding of and expression in art. It became obvious to me that I would have to clarify the individual elements and simplify how the elements related to each other and to the composition as a whole.

This struggle to clarify what I was teaching as well as engage the various interests of my students came at the same time as I was learning to care for my newborn daughter. Anyone who has had children knows that your understanding of time changes. Days passed without the usual arrangement of dividing day from night. As my wife and I both worked, our days were long and our nights seemed to be parcelled out into hourly segments – feeding schedules, diaper changes and dealing with various ailments. With a lack of sleep, days folded into nights and our weeks simply passed by in this soup of repetition. My wife and I were told to keep it simple and remember three things: when the baby is crying check to see if she is hungry; if not does her diaper need changing? Or does she need to burp? Strange as it sounds, when you have little sleep remembering these three things proves nearly impossible. Did you try burping the baby? No. I forgot.

All the while I struggled to clarify for my students the basic elements of design. How were they going to remember all of the various elements and nuances when asked to create art? How were they going to remember the many components of two-dimensional design if I couldn’t even remember three things – feed, diaper and burp?

Over time, I began to simplify my method of teaching by asking one simple question: how do you get someone’s attention visually? For me, the answer was visual dynamics, or contrast, motion and noise. These are the three visual elements that capture the viewer’s attention. Visual dynamics enabled me to connect directly the basic elements of 2-D design to a single, unifying goal: moving the eye.

It is my belief that to be successful visually, an artist must firstly get the viewer’s attention and secondly must control how the viewer perceives a composition. In other words, to get someone to look at your work and to understand a composition you must control how the viewer’s eye moves to and through it. This is accomplished by using the simple concept of visual dynamics – contrast, motion and noise. Visual dynamics is the quickest and most dependable way to move the eye to and through a composition. And every basic element of design can be used to create and control visual dynamics. For example, line is not addressed as a separate entity but as an element to create contrast, motion and noise. When you add other basic elements to line such as shape, value and colour, each additional element is another tool that provides greater control over a composition’s visual dynamics – the level of contrast, the speed and direction of motion, and the type of noise. While the basic skills are developed, the focus remains on how each element relates to visual dynamics and to the composition as a whole. As each new element builds on the previous one, the art-making process becomes easier to understand. And, by focusing on the concept of moving the eye, the fundamental skills are no longer separate from each other or the art-making process. Instead, from the very beginning, the fundamental skills join together and clarify this process. The goal and the process remain simple, consistent and easy to remember. As a result, everything that is created – from an initial sketch to a finished design, or from a painting to a magazine layout–can utilize this same approach.

However, there is one more element that must be included: feeling. The introduction of feeling at this initial stage is invaluable. Artists often talk about feeling in the visual arts. But feeling is a very complex topic. It is difficult to qualify and difficult to verbalize. Many artists know intuitively that feeling must be included with the basic principles, yet are puzzled as to how it should be addressed. And most often, feeling is presented as an afterthought, if at all. But, just like the basic elements, feeling is integral to the design process. Does a composition have a joyous or sombre feeling? Or, as I mentioned earlier, can you create an image of a tiger and make it ferocious, meek or majestic? I believe it is important to connect the basic elements of design to feeling as quickly and clearly as possible. And remarkably, by controlling contrast, motion and noise you simultaneously develop a composition’s feeling. From each simple line exercise to more complex value studies, visual dynamics – contrast, motion and noise – move the eye to and through a composition and clarify feeling.

The principles described in this book are based on my teaching methods. Moving the Eye Through 2-D Design is a common-sense overview of the fundamentals of the visual arts. It is a step-by-step approach that teaches artists how to get the viewer to look at their artwork and, just as importantly, how to maintain the viewer’s attention visually. The book addresses the basic elements of two-dimensional design, including line, shape, value and colour, and explains how each relates to the goal of capturing the viewer’s attention. Yet these fundamentals, although explained singly, are discussed as integrated elements which when used together, both gain and maintain the viewer’s attention. Each new element builds upon the others, making the principles in their totality easier to understand and to remember. This approach applies to every two-dimensional art practice, from the fine and applied arts to digital media. In addition, artists learn how to incorporate feeling into the inception of their creative process rather than it remaining a subjective afterthought, as is often the situation.

Although developments in technology such as digital cameras and computer software have made it accessible for nearly everyone to produce what appears to be a finished design, there hasn’t been a direct and easy-to-understand explanation of what constitutes an effective design. Moving the Eye Through 2-D Design is a comprehensive guide to the elements of 2-D design and provides a structured methodology on how to create visually dynamic compositions. This book is ideal for students, arts educators, and anyone who is interested in understanding basic visual art fundamentals.

Chapter 1

Visual Dynamics

A. R. Penck

Flugblatt (Macht-Besitz), 1974

Synthetic resin on canvas

112.2 × 112.2

© 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Photo © A. R. Penck. Courtesy Galerie Michael Werner Berlin, Cologne and New York

VISUAL DYNAMICS

What is visual dynamics?

In the Introduction I said that the starting point in the visual arts was to get someone to look at what you have created. This is an obvious, yet often over looked point. In the visual world, competition for garnering attention is enormous. Television, print, movies, fine art, industrial design, the Internet, theatre and fashion are all vying for our attention. It is a given that to be successful visually you must move the viewer’s eye to what you have created.

What gets someone to look? Why, when a television is on, do our eyes drift to it, whether we want to watch it or not? Why are we drawn to lightning in the sky or to the headlines of a newspaper?

Let me ask a more direct question. What would you do to get someone’s attention? Imagine you are on a deserted island, an island that has a stand of palm trees, rocks and acres of white sand. Imagine that you want to get off this island. You will need help from others, maybe from people on a passing boat or plane.

The answers are seemingly instinctive and based on our need to survive. If a plane was flying overhead, you might spell H-E-L-P or S-O-S with rocks or branches on the white sand. You might try to start a fire. If a boat was on the horizon, you might wave your arms or wave a large palm branch. You might begin to scream and shout (even if the