"Paintings With Personality"

Carnival Barker, 18x24 watercolor

Honey has a nice trim shape and gets around good for a man of his years. As for myself… well, let’s say life and chocolate have taken their toll. Shapes in art are a whole lot easier to take care of than our physical shapes.

When designing a painting, the shapes are two-dimensional and either organic or geometric. Organic shapes are capricious and irregular, free and spontaneous. Somewhat like my body shape, they are uneven with more curves than angles. When we create shapes, we can make them up or they can represent what we see in our subject. Organic shapes are those that attract our viewer’s interest. Geometric shapes are what we learned about in kindergarten, circles, squares, triangles, and etc. We can recognize them immediately. They make us think of order and conformation. Geometric shapes create problems for painters because they have no character. When artists want their shapes to be dramatic and powerful they stay away from the geometric.

Experienced artists paint with shapes, not objects, changing the shapes into something less predictable than objects. As artists we make ordinary things into something fun and exciting by creating shapes. We can be as imaginative and creative as we want. We let go of labels like “nose, mouth, leaf,” and etc. and think flat shapes rather than three dimensional objects. We accept or dismiss everything we see and include only what is necessary to create a painting that explains how we feel about the scene or person in front of us.

In designing shapes, we think movement, texture, depth, focal area, and how our viewers will enter the painting. We create the shapes using color, value, and lines. Shapes of different sizes create interest and size dominance. Calm shapes are usually horizontal and create a place where our eyes can rest. When shapes (always of different sizes) are repeated they unify a painting and create rhythm. Combining shapes creates simplicity, solidity, and unity. Making shapes that look good takes time but our paintings will be better in the end.

 As painters we lead the eye from one area of an art work to another using shapes. And the paintings are stronger when the number of big shapes and values is limited. Artists create big shapes by combining small shapes of the same value. It is important to keep the values simple and link small shapes into large, abstract, value shapes. A new shape can be created to link two shapes of equal value as long as the “link shape” is of the same value. We create depth with color temperature without changing the actual value to make a strong composition. Any subject will be a good painting, even the boring house across the street, if the design is made of large shapes and a harmonious range of colors.

 Artists use the edges of shapes to help direct the eye where we want it to go, and we keep the strongest lights and darks in the center of interest. When making our value shapes, it doesn’t matter if we have both foreground and background in one large shape. There should be a dominant shape, color and value.

 Making a value sketch (or thumbnail) will help us recognize the values in our scene or subject before beginning our painting. We don’t want to draw precise objects or things, but design our painting with value shapes. Remember, we aren’t painting things, but the shapes that define the things. Making our shapes look good takes time but our paintings will be better in the end.

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“A good design poorly executed is much to be preferred over a poor design well executed.”

 (Edgar A. Whitney)