Today is Design Friday, so your challenge is something the graphic designers will likely be familiar with: figure/ground reversal.
“Figure/ground” is a phrase that came from modern German Gestalt psychology. It refers to how our mind organizes forms, distinguishing an object (figure) from its background (ground).
In the early 1900s Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin famously experimented with figure-ground perception, using black and white optical illusions that reversed, to study how humans perceive figure and ground.
Many artists and art movements throughout the 20th century have played with this figure/ground reversal idea. Perhaps the most famous and obvious examples are the creations by M.C. Escher.
Escher’s Day and Night
In a good composition, all shapes, whether they are the shape of the object or the shape of the space around the object, are equally important. Figure/ground reversals are a great exercise for building appreciation and skill for composition. In addition, the exercise below will make you more aware of spacing, and whether or not shapes touch, almost touch, or overlap. This is very useful in your drawings and paintings!
Matisse
Below are your instructions for the creative design challenge. Please read them carefully.
Figure/Ground Reversal: Initials
Use your own initials to create a series of compositions that play with positive and negative shape relationships.
Cuong Doan
GUIDELINES:
Create variations of your initials in any combination of lower or upper case. For instance, if your first and last initials are “LH” you can use LH, lh, Lh or lH. You can also just pick one letter “L” instead of two, and use the edges of the little composition to interact with, like this:
You can start by sketching lines with pencil, but complete this exercise in clear black and white shapes only. No blending, no texture, no lines.
It’s ok (encouraged!) to let white shapes disappear into white background areas, and black shapes disappear into black background areas. Again, we don’t have to see the full letter for this to work. See example below.
Leon Golub was an awkward man who made ugly paintings. They’re about power mostly. Violence, war, and other unhappy things. I learned about Golub in art school, around the first years of the internet. What impressed me more than his large scale work and hard edged process was his collection of reference images. Golub had file cabinets full …
Frohsin is another painter on the list of Carlos San Millan’s favorites. He had talked about wanting to develop his work into more flat color fields, a move towards the abstract. These paintings by Frohsin and others are his inspirations. I liked these abstracted figures so much I did some research and found more of …
Between 1914 and 1917, Matisse made a series of 69 monotypes, the only monotypes of his career. Matisse created his black-and-white monotypes by covering a copper plate with black ink and then lightly and swiftly scratching into the pigment with a tool, so that the linework emerged through the dark ink ground. To transfer the …
30SAL Challenge: Figure/Ground Initials
Today is Design Friday, so your challenge is something the graphic designers will likely be familiar with: figure/ground reversal.
“Figure/ground” is a phrase that came from modern German Gestalt psychology. It refers to how our mind organizes forms, distinguishing an object (figure) from its background (ground).
In the early 1900s Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin famously experimented with figure-ground perception, using black and white optical illusions that reversed, to study how humans perceive figure and ground.
Many artists and art movements throughout the 20th century have played with this figure/ground reversal idea. Perhaps the most famous and obvious examples are the creations by M.C. Escher.
In a good composition, all shapes, whether they are the shape of the object or the shape of the space around the object, are equally important. Figure/ground reversals are a great exercise for building appreciation and skill for composition. In addition, the exercise below will make you more aware of spacing, and whether or not shapes touch, almost touch, or overlap. This is very useful in your drawings and paintings!
Below are your instructions for the creative design challenge. Please read them carefully.
Figure/Ground Reversal: Initials
Use your own initials to create a series of compositions that play with positive and negative shape relationships.
GUIDELINES:
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