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.
The content below is from the Seattle Artist League’s Official Artist-Not-In-Residence, Patty Haller. We are pits deep in a series called “Stuff that Patty Likes.” Patty’s Ponderous Post “The paintings I’m showing in January 2017 at Smith and Vallee Gallery are my explorations of pattern, color and how to handle the complex data of forest …
Carmen Herrera is a Cuban-American abstract, minimalist painter. She was born in Havana and has lived in New York City since the mid-1950s. She studied alongside famous painters such as Ellsworth Kelly, but because she’s a woman her work and place in history wasn’t recognized wasn’t recognized until recently. Despite the lack of recognition, Herrera …
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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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