Putting it Together-Shapes

We're almost to the end of our week focusing on shapes and how we can use and manipulate them in our work to create more powerful art.

Today, let's put some of the concepts we looked at this week together to work, and see what we can do with them.

Earlier this week, we looked at the shapes that can be made in positive and negative space, repetition of shapes in artwork and how to use them to your advantage, turning reference work upside down or sideways to see the subject in terms of shape better, abstraction of reality by using shapes as a starting point and more.

Here's an idea to try today- take a photo or a scene that you'd like to use as your reference, and divide a page in your art journal or sketchbook into three or four sections. Then try a few different approaches that we discussed this week in the different areas. You can use your artistic license to decide how you'd like to proceed, and have fun with it!

In my example, I worked from an old photo of the silent film starlet, Gloria Swanson. (After all, it's Oscar Night tomorrow night!)

You can see how I experimented with exaggerating parts (like the hand in the first drawing) and with the placement of the shapes that made her up within each section of the page. I tried different papers and media, too. Which one do you think worked best??

Give this idea a try, and share it with us here!