• Special message: Join us tomorrow, Sunday, August 20, 2 pm Eastern for our monthly Live Chat via YouTube. The topic is What Is Visual Balance? Hope to see you there! We are all born with a natural sense of balance. Balance is one of the core principles that makes the universe work, so doesn't it make sense that it would be one of the key factors to making a painting work? Well, it is! One of my favorite paintings by John Singer Sargent is his Oyster Gatherers. He did two versions of it. Here is the one he did in 1878. Look what happens to its balance when I delete the woman and boy on the left. Do you notice now how your eye stays mostly on the right side of the painting? My hashing has thrown off Sargent's visual balance. Human beings receive messages through their senses. We have to receive a message before we can respond to it. We receive messages of pleasant flavors through our sense of taste and we experience the pleasure of eating. We receive blended sounds with our hearing and we feel soothed. We receive a nasty odor through our sense of smell and we turn away from it. We painters are sending visual messages to the sense of sight. We do that by using the visual elements to create our images. Their variations attract the eye to them depending upon their weight. For example, the eye will go to a strong value contrast before it goes to a closer one. Notice which of
the discs your eye goes to first in this design. Most likely your eye went first to the disc on the left. Against the same background, the darker a value is the heavier it is. That strong attraction causes visual weight. Now watch what your eyes do when you look at this one. Try to look at it for about five seconds. Do you notice that your eyes keep wanting to go to the one on the right? That's because, everything else being equal, locating a shape on the edge of a painting carries more visual weight than locating it closer to the
center. Let's do one more. Try to hold your eyes to this one about five seconds, too. Do you notice that your eye no longer is pulled to the right? That is because with everything else being equal, smaller sizes
carry less visual weight than larger ones. Reducing its size in that location gives it balance with the larger one. It might be fun now to compare how your eyes respond to each of these designs. What I have just demonstrated to you is how the variables that cause visual weight work. Tune in to tomorrow's chat to explore with
me ways artists use these. Or if you can't make it to the chat, the replay will be available afterwards. By the way, you can find all of our replays of every chat we do by going to our channel page, then click on LIVE in the menu. Enjoy a delightfully balanced weekend! During my Language of Painting series, I explained the role of our visual elements. If you'd like to review those roles to better understand the behavior of elements, here are the links to each of those
discussions: Color --Value -- Shape -- Texture -- Size -- Line and Direction
You can access the archive of all my newsletters (as well as the Quick Tips and other stuff) at any time by going HERE.
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