All about DESIGN in abstract painting | Judy Woods Art

Hi, Judy here. So I'm showing you this painting because it's one I've just finished and it's a really good example of design and this was a painting that I had been working on for a while and it'd be going to all sorts of different places and I wasn't happy with it so I imposed a strong design on it by putting some template shapes over the top of it to create really strong contrast between light and dark. To check on it, it's a really good idea to have a look at it in black and white. Okay, so you can see that I've got some really nice crisp edges and parts where there's strong dark sitting next to strong light and that's where you get your design from. Now, dialing up the contrast so that I get rid of some of the more subtle differences can help me to see where these are distributed in the composition. So these are two ways of really getting clear on where the design is in the composition and I can see that I've got lots of different shapes. I've got big shapes, little shapes, I've got lines, I've got little tiny little shapes and great big ones and I've got different depths as well in those dark areas. So I've got the components of good strong design. Once I've got that checked off then it really doesn't matter what I do to the painting. I could put lots of gorgeous colour into it, make sure that I can detail and all sorts of things but the design is just really important to have to make sure that it's good. So now I'm going to share with you a design exercise that can help you tune your eye in to finding good design and making sure that you have really strong differences as well as strong contrast between values, between light and dark, that you have differences in the type of shape you have, the marks you have and the way you're delivering those lights and darks in a composition. So follow along this exercise and see what you can come up with. Okay I've been having fun doing a little design exercise. What I did was create four different papers just using black and white paint and I've rolled up a square and I've just been cutting them out and laying them down and creating compositions just looking at value contrasts and leading the eye around and focusing on maximising differences and also links. So having some things that are linking like the lines here and then things that are different like this sort of mark sitting next to that thing and these straight lines next to those curvy lines. So I've done that one and here's another one. Same thing so I've got black paper with some white lines painted on. I've got a light grey paper and I've painted on some sort of soft greyish lines. You can see them here, that sort of thing and I've got a dark grey paper and I've painted on white lines. I've also got white paper with the black lines and on that white paper I also put some pencil lines so I've got a different type of line going on there. I've also included a little photocopy that I had lying around so I've got some photocopies. I've also got text, that's the index of an old book and here's another index of a book that I've photocopied and made much larger and that's where on this one this came from. So I've got black and white photocopies of photos I've taken. So I've got lots of black and white different types of papers and marks and things to play with in making these little collages. So that was the second one and this was actually the first one I did and it's probably the least good one so with each one I feel like I'm getting a little bit better. So let's do another one and see what we can come up with. So the first thing I do is choose a piece of paper that has some sort of interest and a shape that's quite nice and I find that actually doing this sort of thing I don't like to arrange bits of paper when they're not stuck down so I like to stick them down first. I'm just using some gel medium here just to glue it down and put it down in a kind of an interesting way. Try not to put the thing right in the middle and then look for something that's going to be different from that. So that's all very straight, this is kind of interesting. Okay that's interesting to me and this is a little bit like it's, you know, if you learn to play the piano this is a little bit like practicing your scales. It just keeps your eye in, it just gives you a bit of practice on thinking about design. I'm putting that one in because these are vertical, kind of Those are horizontal but there's a link because they're stripes, they're both stripes. Okay so that's another one, so that's quite fun.