texture

i’ve found it surprisingly difficult to differentiate between texture and pattern and found this distinction helpful:

… pattern changes to texture as you loose sight of the individual motifs. This is easy to do with natural patterns, but you have to get quite far away from a checker board grid to see it as texture. Patterns are generally more noticeable than textures. This makes them a stronger visual element for controlling attention.

art 104

first i took photos, trying not to just go for the most obvious textures, but i couldn’t stop the tree trunks and peeling paint creeping in my favourites are the irregular ones (that i guess count as patterns rather than textures, even though they’re definitely textured) the closeups that look like they’re aerial shots of river valleys or canyons.

then i constructed textures from collected natural objects.

i’ve kept the bits so that i can try drawing them, to really internalise the textures:

To deepen and control their perception the students had to look at, touch and draw materials such as wood, bark, and fur until they were able to draw them by heart, without the orignals, from their personal sensation. such a study of nature reproduction, from memory, of the onjects observed and experienced is an interpretative, not an imitative procedure. Drawings produced in this manner appear instantly alive and convincing.

itten: design and form

then i made collages of textures cut from a magazine (actually, the ever-lovely toast catalogue). i really enjoyed this, although the pics of the end result aren’t so great. i was particularly pleased with the more unlikely ones like houses or market stalls.

i’ve found that as i go along i’m becoming much more aware of texture in my daily life, and much better at spotting the less obvious ones. the last time i browsed an online fabric shop i found it was the (visual) texture of the fabrics that stood out to me, rather than the colour or pattern as would normally be the case.

next i want to explore contrast, the cornerstone of of itten’s teaching: so far i’ve just been taking inspiration from students’ found object texture collages in the bauhaus textiles book.