Lesson 6 – Style

This lesson is short, because style mostly comes from self-expression and personal vision. You cannot teach these, so it’s important to encourage. However, we also use the Style category of our lessons for design – to help artists improve their compositions, and that is very teachable.

In this lesson, you’re going to learn what makes one composition better than another, and how to facilitate the process of creating the best designs.

Finding your best

There are two types of drawings: fast drawing and slow drawing. Slow drawing is art. Fast drawing is for designing that art. Design is all about moving things around and decision-making. This process is super fast in our brains. Imagine setting a table. You suddenly realize you want less space in-between the glasses and the plates. You move them and you’re done. The process is slowed down only by your physical moving of the glasses. The decision to move the glasses might have taken a bit of experimentation, moving one glass back and forth a couple of times, and then an instant of decision.

That’s how our designing mind works. Very, very fast.

Working on the composition of any artwork is like making the table arrangement. Decisions are instant. Moving and changing things around is what takes time. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of time to draw a whole picture. Much more time than simply moving glasses, so artists tend to not do this. They might wonder what a change would do to their composition, but never actually do all that work to see what it looks like. It takes way too long.

So artists generally avoid trying out different designs. They settle for their first idea for their composition.

But they can try many things, changing sizes, position, proportion, colors, texture, contrast, value… it’s almost an endless number of choices an artist has. It seems logical that a few changes here and there might make a profound difference.

And they do. Having alternatives to choose from is vital for an artist. This is what separates the merely ok art, from the stellar art. So what does an artist do? How can you view several designs to choose from without spending all that extra time?

If you’ve read my book, 9 Art Myths Totally Busted, then you might remember the part about time travel. (If you haven’t, the book is free. Get yours at this link). Time traveling is when artists can go forward to look at a design when a work will be finished and then come back and fix the things they didn’t like, before they actually do them. That would be quite a trick! But there really is such a trick. It’s virtual time travel, and it has everything to do with drawing fast instead of slow.

Quick Draw

When you’re arranging the design of a painting, you want speed. You can’t just speed yourself up, like an online video, but you can take all the details out. This is where an artist gets to use their special skill of envisioning. Imagining the details is actually pretty easy for artists. So all that is really needed to view a future design, are the Frame and the Big Shapes.

We can speed up these too, by drawing our entire composition in miniature. That’s right, very small drawings are very fast to make. Artists have been doing this for centuries, and we call these tiny drawings, thumbnail sketches.

A small thumbnail sketch is no bigger than 1 or 2 inches and should take no more than 10 to 30 seconds to make. The idea is to only draw your Frame, and 4 to 5 of the biggest simple shapes. By drawing fast, an artist can try out many different ideas for their composition in just a few minutes.

It takes a bit of practice to learn to do these fast, but the rewards are worth it. 10 minutes of planning before beginning a work of art, can make the next several hours of work far more productive.

Most young artists are not fond of these initial steps, since they seem like they’re delaying the real artwork and they don’t believe they can do better than their first try. Help them make the attempt but don’t push too hard. If they don’t want to do thumbnails, have your artist try at least one, making sure they know they’re getting a break from doing the 3 or 4 that are required in the lessons. They may always choose their first drawing simply in order to prove they shouldn’t do thumbnails. This will pass.

You can add credibility to this common lesson requirement as they progress. Tell them you know that professional artists use thumbnails (I am one, and I do), and that you’ve read (just now) that good art schools require their students to turn in thumbnails with every project, or they don’t get a grade.

If your student gets to the end of a project, and wishes they had done something different, that is the moment. You can gently and genuinely ask them if they think a set of thumbnails might help them avoid this regret on the next project. Because that is what they are for. Don’t make them feel bad about it or they’ll dig in even more just to prove it was an anomaly.

Always remember that artists will see their need to improve in time, at their own pace. What they reject today, will most likely be something they’ll embrace down the road. That’s why it is important to not push too much; to keep the fun and enjoyment of art, while also keeping alive the ideas like thumbnails that lead to better art.

Artists need to discover things for themselves – this is much better than being told what to do. Some of our lessons begin with a difficult warmup that helps them discover the lesson points later on, and see their progress.

6 Design Principles

So what actually makes a composition better? Established principles of design, that’s what. There are several of these, and they most often come out as 6 principles. I say, “most often”, because artists don’t agree on very much and there are sometimes 5 and sometimes 7. I can’t help this. There is no world council of artists. If one were created, we would all get bored and go home anyway.

No matter how many principles of design there are, the basics of them are the same at heart. After a lot of research, I distilled all of the variations down into the following six, which I believe fully incorporate the same concepts as any other good set of design principles.

1. Size

2. Contrast

3. Repetition

4. Balance

5. Emphasis

6. Harmony

I noticed that we use the first 3 to accomplish the last 3, so I divided them into 3 Design Methods, and 3 Design Goals. You won’t see this division anywhere else, but I don’t know why. It seems pretty obvious.

Methods

SIZE

This includes several aspects of size: proportion, which is the difference between two or more measurements, and the size of distances of elements. Distances will affect alignments and placement as well.

Artists can change size aspects of elements in their work to make things look more accurate (or less), and to affect the goals: balance, emphasis, and harmony.

CONTRAST

This includes value, or light to dark changes. Adjusting contrast to be high or low will achieve different things in different compositions. Contrast can be adjusted for more than just value though:

1. Value
2. Color
3. Texture
4. Size

Artists use contrast to affect balance, emphasis, and harmony.

REPETITION

Repeating an element creates predictability which is comforting. A feeling of rhythm is heightened when repeated elements are lined up.

Artists use repetition to affect balance and emphasis, but especially harmony.

Goals

BALANCE

Balance on a 2-dimensional surface is not absolute, meaning that people don’t always agree on balance. It comes from our experience of the real world. If you draw something that looks like it would fall over, we feel like it isn’t very well balanced. Sometimes the space around things can have weight too, just like elements, so balance can be achieved in different ways.

EMPHASIS

This term is very abstract and difficult to explain to younger children, so I changed it to, “The Most Important Spot” in our lessons. Every work is better if the most important spot is clearly visible, and having second and third most important spots is also helpful. This is easier to identify than the other 2 goals, and helpfully, it is most often responsible for a design looking good or bad. Having a weak emphasis means that elements fight for dominance and that makes the viewer uncomfortable. They don’t know what to look at first.

HARMONY

When a work seems calm to us, it can be said to have quiet harmony. A “loud” work can also have great harmony, if the elements are enjoyably dramatic. If a work is disturbing or jarring, then the harmony is low.

All 3 goals are subjective, meaning that people can have different opinions about the same art piece. Emphasis is the most clearly recognizable though, and is the most important of all design goals.

Different goals for different artists

The goal of most artists is good design, which can be said to feel comfortable. Some artists have the goal of disruption and discomfort. In their work you may see purpose in not having clearly defined harmony, emphasis, or balance, because they want their audience to think about uncomfortable things.

How to use the Principles

Artists often need to wait a bit after work is finished, before evaluating it. There is usually a honeymoon phase, right after a work is finished, that prevents objective viewing of our own work. This wears off soon, and then we sometimes view the work with a more critical eye. It can take anywhere from an hour, to several months, but eventually, most artists change their evaluation of their own work. Sometimes we’ll despise the very work we loved a few days ago. This is normal. So very normal.

Other times artists need help.

Artists should ask for feedback about their work from trusted sources who will be careful but honest. In this way they can get a better idea about the general consensus for the 3 goals in their work.

Artists need to practice how to ask for real help and make it clear when they’re just proud and want applause. Parents and friends must also practice! Try to be aware of these two ways of asking for feedback. If an artist asks, “what do you think?” and holds up a finished work, they are usually just wanting audience applause. When they wonder aloud why they don’t like their work, or ask for help with a specific problem, then you can ask for permission to help them evaluate.

After gaining permission, then you can help. Permission is extremely important.

After gaining permission to help, you can go through each of the 3 goals and evaluate each one for strong areas and potential weak areas. Ask a lot of questions instead of making a lot of statements.

That’s how you help artists improve their style. By engaging in the process of evaluation using the 6 principles of design, and by encouraging experimentation at the beginning of work.

In the next lesson we’ll move even more into how to bolster an artist’s confidence as they learn and grow.