Finding Visual Movement

Published: Sat, 01/16/21

Dear ,

Drawing is the skill of allowing your eyes to guide your hand. It's that simple. But there is a catch: you eyes have to see beyond what a thing is.

VISUAL MOVEMENT

You would not be able to hear a tune if the notes didn't move up and down the musical scale. Visual movement is the visual version of the movement of sound. You ear hears an audible movement of sounds. Your eye sees a visual movement along the edges of images. (There are other ways we see visual movement, but for this Tip, we're focusing only on edges.) Take a look at the photo below.

You see those trees because of the value contrasts between each tree and the snow, but it is the movement of the lines forming the edges of the trees that cause us to recognize the images as trees. Those lines are moving in a vertical direction, but those edges are also moving unevenly-sometimes jagged, sometimes curved, sometimes broken-- not straight as an arrow.

If with a pencil in your hand, you allow your eye to guide it, following the movement of those edges, it might look something this.

What your pencil is doing is recording a a visual movement that we will recognize as tree trunk.

THE KEY

The key to discovering visual movement is to put out of your mind what the image is and allow your eye to flow along its edges, watching the direction in which that movement is going including the irregularities - the little detours - that the particular movement takes. This will not happen if you think tree or are trying to make a drawing of a tree.

Finding the movement of the edges is just the beginning. Once we master that skill - some call it the contour - we can then allow our eyes to explore the visual movement inside the image. Yep, it lives there, too!

Enjoy a Delightful Weekend!

P.S. On Sunday, January 17, (tomorrow) at 2 p.m. Eastern, I will be doing our second Live Chat from our YouTube Channel. You can go to https://youtube.com/inthestudioartinstruction to get access to the chat. Just click on the frame that refers to the Live Chat. (To join and become a Studio Insider, click on the JOIN button.) You do not have to be a member to watch the Chat.

The topic for tomorrow's chat is Problems Composing Paintings.

To be able to ask a question, you must be a Studio Insider which is a membership for $4.99 per month. Members get other perks, too--Each first Sunday of every month, members get a free video snippet from one of my tutorials, each second Sunday of each month, members get a coupon code for a free tutorial download, and every third Sunday every month, members get to ask questions during the chat.

THIS IS IMPORTANT: To get all these perks in an email the moment they become available, be sure you have clicked in your YouTube account to RECEIVE NOTIFICATIONS.

Happy Painting,

Dianne

dianne@diannemize.com

You can access the archive of all my newsletters at anytime by going HERE.