In our second session, we learnt about the Principle of Designs. There are a few concepts that artists usually use in painting, however we focused on 4 principles: Balance, Emphasis, Movement and Rhythm. 

This is a group project, and within a group of 4 people, we paint based on topics that we get and make A3 size thumbnails of painting to form a storyline with each thumbnail representing one principle. Our group got the topic of duck and plastic bottle.

First of all, we create a draft of how the storyline in thumbnails and we call it Plastic Bottle and Duck Adventure:

The Balance Principle is the distribution of the visual weight of objects, colours, texture, and space. Elements on canvas should be balanced to make a design feel stable. In our case, we decided to make the design feel stable using soft-edged triangular shapes to make the sand dunes of the beach and the waves. Soft pastel colours were also used and blue colour was used for both the sky and the ocean to create a sense of balance in the painting. As such, we decided to paint the first scenario as such:

It’s a peaceful day by the beach

Emphasis is the part of the design that catches the viewer’s attention. Usually the artist will make one area stand out by contrasting it with other areas. Our group decided to make the main object (bottle) stand out among bags of trash my painting the bottle bigger than the rest and colour in differently, so that audience’s eyes will be attracted to the bottle first then the rest of the canvas.

But wait, take a closer look, there are lots of trash on the beach!

Movement is the path the viewer’s eye takes through the work of art, often to focal areas. Such movement can be directed along lines, edges, shape and color within the work of art. Our group decided to lead viewer’s eye towards the duck in the middle by using wave lines and the bottle pointing towards the duck itself. As a result, viewer’s eyes will always be led by these lines and end up looking at the duck in the middle.

There is a duck swimming in the sea. Duck is attracted by plastic bottles

Rhythm is created when one or more elements of design are used repeatedly to create a feeling of organized movement. Rhythm creates a mood like music or dancing. For this fourth design principle that we used, we create rhythm by using shapes such as triangles, squares and circles in  different sizes and colours. Tears were drawn in different sizes of the same shape to create the rhythmic feeling.

Oh no! The poor duck swallowed a bottle and ended up struggling and crying