
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.

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.
#Organic shapes art definition 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
