Iconic Shapes
May 31, 2020
Inspirational Art
If there was a shape that could represent state of the world today, what would you say that is? Chances are, you’re thinking of something that works as an icon or symbol rather than something as simple as a circle or octagon. Abstract shapes are something I touched upon only briefly in the article about shape and form at the beginning of the month. They are most commonly created for things that we are already familiar with, many of which are considered universal. Some have been with us for ages such as stars, teardrops, and hearts, but simplified shapes will pop up whenever a quick method of communication that is not language dependent is needed or preferred.
For instance, right now, a square with half circles on the ends, often with a few horizontal lines in the square, represents a medical mask. Such an icon may have meant nothing to you at the start of this year but it’s hard not to recognize it for what it is now.
That is the power of abstract shapes. With minimal characteristics, these shapes represent an object if not an entire concept. For this reason, I suggest you to not use them too frivolously. If you pop a heart shape on something, it should be because your intention necessitates calling on the viewer’s emotions rather than just putting it on to be cute. Now, I’m not saying that using hearts to be cute is a bad thing but realize that people will see it as an emotional expression. And I say emotional, not love, because the heart represents a base positive emotion associated with love, caring, and happiness but if your heart shape has a hole in it, is cracked or torn, or is jet black, the viewer will start thinking of things like loneliness, sadness, or even animosity.
Not all abstract shapes have such a wide range of potential meaning but many can elicit a similar or even stronger reaction, such as the shape of a cross or particular types of star shapes, depending on the context in which it’s used.
If you want to use abstract shapes but do not want to be so obvious or bring up the more common associations, you might find it useful to combine abstract shapes or to use them in unexpected ways. This approach to the use of abstract shapes can make for a much more subtle or complex statement which means your viewer will probably react more viscerally even with a readily recognized shape since its associations won’t be so blunt.
Here are just a few examples of abstract shapes where the association with them has been toned down.
Here, Elsie Smith overlays the impression of leaf forms on heart shapes showing just how perfectly they fit together. Pairing these makes the heart a gentle emotional background to the focus on, and apparent love of, nature’s intricate leaf formations.
This next one is a really good synergy of recognizable abstract shapes. Speaking in terms of the silhouette of the piece below as well as the focal point of the opening image, we could see a sunburst, a starburst, or a flower shape. Since Zuda Gay Pease was primarily creating flowers at the time she created this, we can assume her intention was for it to be a flower, but the energy of all those many pointed tips makes it come across as celestial. So, we get a combined association – the femininity and beauty of the floral shape with the energy and excitement of bursting light. It’s quite an impressive mix.
It’s interesting that practically all types of celestial bodies have a recognizable abstract shape (or variations of them.) There is probably nothing quite so common in abstract celestial shapes as a crescent moon. Our association with it can be fairly wide ranging from simply symbolizing the quiet and dark of night to embodying the ebb and flow of life.
In this example, I found it very curious that the lines on these crescents appear to be sun symbols with all their brilliant energy, and the bright blue ends of the crescent, visually truncating the shape, make us less likely to think crescent moon than simply an angular and curvy shape. The moon and its mysteries therefore become a quiet background to the louder energy of the colors and lines. I really like this contrast of concepts here as the sun and the blue color brings in a liveliness while the unconscious reaction to the moon shape is a quiet but divergent undertow. (Unfortunately, the Etsy shop from which this was saved is no longer available, so I am not sure who created it. If anyone knows, I would be ever so grateful if you would send me their name so I can update it.)
Is this making sense? I don’t think it’s hard to grasp the general idea of how iconic an abstract shape can be so I’m going to keep this short today. It’s also been a busy week getting all your accounts fixed up and so I should get off this computer. I challenge you to look around at the way abstract shapes are used in art work, be it your own or other people’s pieces.
Go Forth and Be Free… to be Inspired, For Free!
If you haven’t heard yet, starting in June (this next weekend) I will be posting the upcoming Virtual Art Box content previously planned for the VAB membership project on this blog so everyone can read it for free. I wanted readers, regardless of budget right now, to have access to these discussions, lessons, and exercises so we can all work on our art and increasing our skills and enjoyment together as well as give me the opportunity to take my work load down a notch or take breaks when necessary without being unfair to paid subscribers.
So, you can look forward to some in-depth article length discussions and ideas with a bit more juice to it than the blog usually has along with ideas on how to work with and apply the concepts if you so desire. Take it like a free class or just let the ideas sink in and enjoy the art. It’ll be here for you, starting next weekend.
Supporting Free Content
I am glad to have your support, in anyway you can provide it, to help me produce this content for free. Your supportive emails are always appreciated but if you want to help me keep the lights on, making purchases on the website is one of the best ways to do so since it gets you (or a lucky giftee) something to enjoy as well giving the contributing artists further exposure all while helping to keep me in busines.
If you have everything you want from the website at the moment, I have provided a donation option here for those who have asked and can afford to toss me a little something to help me, in particular, pay my tech guy and allow me much needed doses of dark chocolate!
So … until next weekend!
Cane Components–Breaking it Down
July 10, 2013
Inspirational Art, Tips and Tricks
When it comes down to it, canes are not much more than components that we collect into a visually cohesive whole. It sounds simple. Bring a number of shapes, colors and/or lines together and you have a cane. But its the intention of the design, the way you choose components and how you arrange them that makes the cane worthy of becoming that important part of a piece of art.
One of the best ways to learn about arrangement of components for a cane is to actually do it backwards; start with any visual item of a recognizable image you wish–an illustration or a photo–and break it down into its components. Identify each color, each shape, every line that makes up the image. From these components you can reproduce the image in a cane. But first you need the analytical skill to break it down.
A big box of colored pencils can help you break down the colors in the image. Make sample ‘swatches’ of the colors with the color pencils on the side of a print out of the image. Yes, you could do this with polymer as well; but the color pencils keep you in a narrow focus of just analyzing color, not creating it, and speeds up the process. Same goes for not using a computer aided analysis of the image … you need to walk yourself through this, going through the process of comparing each color to the selection you have available.
To break down the shapes and lines, a bit of tracing paper upon which you outline each block of color and each complete line you would need to duplicate in a single polymer color will help you see the individual components.
This analysis you go through in order to reproduce the image will force your brain to do something it purposely and necessarily does not normally do … see an image as the bits and pieces that make it up, not the whole of the image itself. It can be quite a hurdle to get your brain to stop trying to make a recognizable image out of the pieces before it. But this is what you must do to reproduce an image as a cane. And learning how components work together will help you in creating even the most abstract canes. You learn how shapes, lines and colors work together, and that is the basis of every cane you will ever make.
Canes are not that different from pointillism or representational mosaics. An artist puts different colored dots or shapes together, and when you back away from the surface so you can’t see the components a complete image emerges. Take a look at any of Julie Eakes incredible examples of caning to see this exact effect.
If you want to really dig into this concept, read through Julie’s blog and/or get one of her CraftArtEdu classes on caning.
The Art of Subtle Variation
May 25, 2013
Inspirational Art
We’ve been talking about pushing variation all week. Pushing it usually means you are leaning towards an extreme, or at least a pretty good departure from the norm. But I wanted to correct that notion a bit. I do think swinging that pendulum to an extreme can be great for breaking through any creative barriers, but sometimes it’s the subtle changes that can really make a difference.
Little changes in your design elements can take something from still and calm to energized and exciting. I’m not say still and calm is bad, but changing the forms from what one might expect or varying them in a single piece can produce a whole new feeling in the piece.
Let’s take this piece by Judy Kuskin. This necklace has circles, rectangles and triangles in it. Sort of.
The shapes here are not, for the most part, standard or evenly shaped, except the circles and the oblong center bead. And none of the shapes match their brethren. None of the ‘rectangles’ are actually rectangles (the shape is called a quadrilateral… just a shape with four sides); instead, they are all are off-kilter, some more than others, and are hung at varying orientations. Same thing with the triangles. The circles are also different sizes, with different accent pieces in them. What Judy has done is broken our expectations. We naturally look for repetition, cohesiveness, and pattern. There isn’t any pattern here, except in a lack of repetition and consistency. This makes our eye bounce around the necklace, looking for what we expect and a place to rest. Having neither actually provides the sense of movement and energy we get from it.
This kind of full departure from expectation can be difficult to master. But as you experiment with variations in your work, you can at least take away the idea of pushing something – like a shape or the orientation of a shape – and changing it so it isn’t standard. Cut off the tip of a triangle. Slice in the sides of a square. Remove the petals in one section of a flower. Punch out the side of a circle like an eclipsing sun. Small, subtle changes like this can take a piece that you don’t find as exciting as you wanted it to be and really give it some punch.
Changes don’t need to be big and bold to make a big or bold difference. Playing with your options will help you learn what will work, and when.
Circles and Dots and Things that Go Round
April 13, 2013
Inspirational Art
I know I bombarded you with swirls and curls this week but while we are on the subject, I thought we could look at another element that also really draws our attention. The circle.
Circles are a prominent element in all kinds of artwork because they are one of the most powerful basic shapes we know. It is the shape of some of the most important elements in our world such as the sun, the earth, the moon, eyes, and human faces. Circles are a signal to focus in on a particular spot; we don’t usually put a square or triangle around something we want to make note of … we draw a circle. It’s also a very pleasing shape … balanced, continuous, and soft. So if you use it in artwork, a circle, more so than probably any other element you have in a piece, will draw the eye.
So what if you use a lot of circles? And dots which are designators like pins on a map? Well, I think you can get a lot of attention. Just look at these pieces by Beatriz Rubio. Circles and dots and spots … you can’t help but check them out, can you?
So what have we learned this week, kids? Things that go round can certainly draw our attention. That’s enough for now. It’s the weekend. Time to go out and play!
Fun with Leftovers
February 6, 2013
Technique tutorials, Tips and Tricks
I don’t know how many pieces I’ve made resulted from looking over at my scattered scraps and suddenly seeing a new texture, form or design in the randomness. Its kind of like finding animals in the shapes of clouds … you look over and you see shape for a pendant, the texture for necklace or a form that could make an interesting bead.
So when perusing some collected online tutorials, I stopped at this very pretty bit of modified mokume which is pictured in a tutorial titled “How to make faux snake skin or honeycomb veneers” by Desiree McCrorey and really wished I could grab, not a slice from the revealed slab but rather those first holey layers off the top. Wouldn’t they look just so striking pressed onto a sheet of pearl clay, those thin little edges of purple around the circles framing the background color?
I wonder how many other people out there automatically do that as well? I know Helen Breil does … that is how she came up with the curling and frame type shapes which are the basis of her new book Shapes (which we review in the upcoming Spring 2013 issue of The Polymer Arts.) That kind of eye is hard to teach. But I would recommend that before balling up your scraps and tossing them in the scrap bin you look at what you have and see if anything jumps out at you. Just that could send you on a whole new journey and invigorate your line if you are looking for something new. You just never know and all it takes is keeping your eyes wide open.
If there was a shape that could represent state of the world today, what would you say that is? Chances are, you’re thinking of something that works as an icon or symbol rather than something as simple as a circle or octagon. Abstract shapes are something I touched upon only briefly in the article about shape and form at the beginning of the month. They are most commonly created for things that we are already familiar with, many of which are considered universal. Some have been with us for ages such as stars, teardrops, and hearts, but simplified shapes will pop up whenever a quick method of communication that is not language dependent is needed or preferred.
For instance, right now, a square with half circles on the ends, often with a few horizontal lines in the square, represents a medical mask. Such an icon may have meant nothing to you at the start of this year but it’s hard not to recognize it for what it is now.
That is the power of abstract shapes. With minimal characteristics, these shapes represent an object if not an entire concept. For this reason, I suggest you to not use them too frivolously. If you pop a heart shape on something, it should be because your intention necessitates calling on the viewer’s emotions rather than just putting it on to be cute. Now, I’m not saying that using hearts to be cute is a bad thing but realize that people will see it as an emotional expression. And I say emotional, not love, because the heart represents a base positive emotion associated with love, caring, and happiness but if your heart shape has a hole in it, is cracked or torn, or is jet black, the viewer will start thinking of things like loneliness, sadness, or even animosity.
Not all abstract shapes have such a wide range of potential meaning but many can elicit a similar or even stronger reaction, such as the shape of a cross or particular types of star shapes, depending on the context in which it’s used.
If you want to use abstract shapes but do not want to be so obvious or bring up the more common associations, you might find it useful to combine abstract shapes or to use them in unexpected ways. This approach to the use of abstract shapes can make for a much more subtle or complex statement which means your viewer will probably react more viscerally even with a readily recognized shape since its associations won’t be so blunt.
Here are just a few examples of abstract shapes where the association with them has been toned down.
Here, Elsie Smith overlays the impression of leaf forms on heart shapes showing just how perfectly they fit together. Pairing these makes the heart a gentle emotional background to the focus on, and apparent love of, nature’s intricate leaf formations.
This next one is a really good synergy of recognizable abstract shapes. Speaking in terms of the silhouette of the piece below as well as the focal point of the opening image, we could see a sunburst, a starburst, or a flower shape. Since Zuda Gay Pease was primarily creating flowers at the time she created this, we can assume her intention was for it to be a flower, but the energy of all those many pointed tips makes it come across as celestial. So, we get a combined association – the femininity and beauty of the floral shape with the energy and excitement of bursting light. It’s quite an impressive mix.
It’s interesting that practically all types of celestial bodies have a recognizable abstract shape (or variations of them.) There is probably nothing quite so common in abstract celestial shapes as a crescent moon. Our association with it can be fairly wide ranging from simply symbolizing the quiet and dark of night to embodying the ebb and flow of life.
In this example, I found it very curious that the lines on these crescents appear to be sun symbols with all their brilliant energy, and the bright blue ends of the crescent, visually truncating the shape, make us less likely to think crescent moon than simply an angular and curvy shape. The moon and its mysteries therefore become a quiet background to the louder energy of the colors and lines. I really like this contrast of concepts here as the sun and the blue color brings in a liveliness while the unconscious reaction to the moon shape is a quiet but divergent undertow. (Unfortunately, the Etsy shop from which this was saved is no longer available, so I am not sure who created it. If anyone knows, I would be ever so grateful if you would send me their name so I can update it.)
Is this making sense? I don’t think it’s hard to grasp the general idea of how iconic an abstract shape can be so I’m going to keep this short today. It’s also been a busy week getting all your accounts fixed up and so I should get off this computer. I challenge you to look around at the way abstract shapes are used in art work, be it your own or other people’s pieces.
Go Forth and Be Free… to be Inspired, For Free!
If you haven’t heard yet, starting in June (this next weekend) I will be posting the upcoming Virtual Art Box content previously planned for the VAB membership project on this blog so everyone can read it for free. I wanted readers, regardless of budget right now, to have access to these discussions, lessons, and exercises so we can all work on our art and increasing our skills and enjoyment together as well as give me the opportunity to take my work load down a notch or take breaks when necessary without being unfair to paid subscribers.
So, you can look forward to some in-depth article length discussions and ideas with a bit more juice to it than the blog usually has along with ideas on how to work with and apply the concepts if you so desire. Take it like a free class or just let the ideas sink in and enjoy the art. It’ll be here for you, starting next weekend.
Supporting Free Content
I am glad to have your support, in anyway you can provide it, to help me produce this content for free. Your supportive emails are always appreciated but if you want to help me keep the lights on, making purchases on the website is one of the best ways to do so since it gets you (or a lucky giftee) something to enjoy as well giving the contributing artists further exposure all while helping to keep me in busines.
If you have everything you want from the website at the moment, I have provided a donation option here for those who have asked and can afford to toss me a little something to help me, in particular, pay my tech guy and allow me much needed doses of dark chocolate!
So … until next weekend!
Read MoreWhen it comes down to it, canes are not much more than components that we collect into a visually cohesive whole. It sounds simple. Bring a number of shapes, colors and/or lines together and you have a cane. But its the intention of the design, the way you choose components and how you arrange them that makes the cane worthy of becoming that important part of a piece of art.
One of the best ways to learn about arrangement of components for a cane is to actually do it backwards; start with any visual item of a recognizable image you wish–an illustration or a photo–and break it down into its components. Identify each color, each shape, every line that makes up the image. From these components you can reproduce the image in a cane. But first you need the analytical skill to break it down.
A big box of colored pencils can help you break down the colors in the image. Make sample ‘swatches’ of the colors with the color pencils on the side of a print out of the image. Yes, you could do this with polymer as well; but the color pencils keep you in a narrow focus of just analyzing color, not creating it, and speeds up the process. Same goes for not using a computer aided analysis of the image … you need to walk yourself through this, going through the process of comparing each color to the selection you have available.
To break down the shapes and lines, a bit of tracing paper upon which you outline each block of color and each complete line you would need to duplicate in a single polymer color will help you see the individual components.
This analysis you go through in order to reproduce the image will force your brain to do something it purposely and necessarily does not normally do … see an image as the bits and pieces that make it up, not the whole of the image itself. It can be quite a hurdle to get your brain to stop trying to make a recognizable image out of the pieces before it. But this is what you must do to reproduce an image as a cane. And learning how components work together will help you in creating even the most abstract canes. You learn how shapes, lines and colors work together, and that is the basis of every cane you will ever make.
Canes are not that different from pointillism or representational mosaics. An artist puts different colored dots or shapes together, and when you back away from the surface so you can’t see the components a complete image emerges. Take a look at any of Julie Eakes incredible examples of caning to see this exact effect.
If you want to really dig into this concept, read through Julie’s blog and/or get one of her CraftArtEdu classes on caning.
Read More
We’ve been talking about pushing variation all week. Pushing it usually means you are leaning towards an extreme, or at least a pretty good departure from the norm. But I wanted to correct that notion a bit. I do think swinging that pendulum to an extreme can be great for breaking through any creative barriers, but sometimes it’s the subtle changes that can really make a difference.
Little changes in your design elements can take something from still and calm to energized and exciting. I’m not say still and calm is bad, but changing the forms from what one might expect or varying them in a single piece can produce a whole new feeling in the piece.
Let’s take this piece by Judy Kuskin. This necklace has circles, rectangles and triangles in it. Sort of.
The shapes here are not, for the most part, standard or evenly shaped, except the circles and the oblong center bead. And none of the shapes match their brethren. None of the ‘rectangles’ are actually rectangles (the shape is called a quadrilateral… just a shape with four sides); instead, they are all are off-kilter, some more than others, and are hung at varying orientations. Same thing with the triangles. The circles are also different sizes, with different accent pieces in them. What Judy has done is broken our expectations. We naturally look for repetition, cohesiveness, and pattern. There isn’t any pattern here, except in a lack of repetition and consistency. This makes our eye bounce around the necklace, looking for what we expect and a place to rest. Having neither actually provides the sense of movement and energy we get from it.
This kind of full departure from expectation can be difficult to master. But as you experiment with variations in your work, you can at least take away the idea of pushing something – like a shape or the orientation of a shape – and changing it so it isn’t standard. Cut off the tip of a triangle. Slice in the sides of a square. Remove the petals in one section of a flower. Punch out the side of a circle like an eclipsing sun. Small, subtle changes like this can take a piece that you don’t find as exciting as you wanted it to be and really give it some punch.
Changes don’t need to be big and bold to make a big or bold difference. Playing with your options will help you learn what will work, and when.
Read More
I know I bombarded you with swirls and curls this week but while we are on the subject, I thought we could look at another element that also really draws our attention. The circle.
Circles are a prominent element in all kinds of artwork because they are one of the most powerful basic shapes we know. It is the shape of some of the most important elements in our world such as the sun, the earth, the moon, eyes, and human faces. Circles are a signal to focus in on a particular spot; we don’t usually put a square or triangle around something we want to make note of … we draw a circle. It’s also a very pleasing shape … balanced, continuous, and soft. So if you use it in artwork, a circle, more so than probably any other element you have in a piece, will draw the eye.
So what if you use a lot of circles? And dots which are designators like pins on a map? Well, I think you can get a lot of attention. Just look at these pieces by Beatriz Rubio. Circles and dots and spots … you can’t help but check them out, can you?
So what have we learned this week, kids? Things that go round can certainly draw our attention. That’s enough for now. It’s the weekend. Time to go out and play!
Read MoreI don’t know how many pieces I’ve made resulted from looking over at my scattered scraps and suddenly seeing a new texture, form or design in the randomness. Its kind of like finding animals in the shapes of clouds … you look over and you see shape for a pendant, the texture for necklace or a form that could make an interesting bead.
So when perusing some collected online tutorials, I stopped at this very pretty bit of modified mokume which is pictured in a tutorial titled “How to make faux snake skin or honeycomb veneers” by Desiree McCrorey and really wished I could grab, not a slice from the revealed slab but rather those first holey layers off the top. Wouldn’t they look just so striking pressed onto a sheet of pearl clay, those thin little edges of purple around the circles framing the background color?
I wonder how many other people out there automatically do that as well? I know Helen Breil does … that is how she came up with the curling and frame type shapes which are the basis of her new book Shapes (which we review in the upcoming Spring 2013 issue of The Polymer Arts.) That kind of eye is hard to teach. But I would recommend that before balling up your scraps and tossing them in the scrap bin you look at what you have and see if anything jumps out at you. Just that could send you on a whole new journey and invigorate your line if you are looking for something new. You just never know and all it takes is keeping your eyes wide open.
Read More