Altered Book Lesson 7, The Elements of Design

In this lesson we learned about the five elements of design, line, form and shape, space, texture and colour.  Our homework is to create a page showing each of these elements.

Line

On this page I have shown "line" in three different ways.  Firstly the zig-zag line that the skier has left in the snow.  Secondly the line shape of the trees , along the bottom of the branches wavy and along the top straight, this is somewhat hidden by the gesso snow.  Thirdly the line of trees rising up from the bottom left of the page to the top right.

Form and Shape 

On this page I have illustrated shape in the background, I have reflected the three colours of the baubles to give the page unity,  it is a flat surface with no depth or thickness.  The element of design Form I have illustrated with the round and grape shaped baubles.  Though they are just photographs cut from a magazine the 3-D geometric effect has been achieved by the reflections of light shinning from the glass.

Space

This is a difficult one to see from the photograph, I have used two overlapping sheets of paper the distant one is of a bundt tin full of chocolate truffles, the overlapping sheet is on the left and is a picture of fruits and ribbon.  I die cut some flowers out of the top layer before sticking down.  The die cut holes in the paper are shown by the negative space that surrounds them and are themselves two-dimensional spaces, having no depth.  I tried to highlight the area along the edges of the shape.  I made the flowers from the cut out shapes of progressively smaller size and wound them through the page to show distance.

If you squint your eyes you can see a three dimensional shape in the bundt tin, this is achieved by colour hues gradually getting darker as it receeds into the picture against a background that becomes lighter.

Texture

For this page I used a piece of corrugated cardboard as the background which I wiped with a damp piece of paper towel to make removing just the top layer in places to leave the ridged center piece exposed in some areas.  I painted this to varying degrees with gesso and stamped a Christmas stamp with brown Stazon down the right hand side.  The word "December" and the number 25 were also stamped with Stazon brown ink and I used some foam stamps that give a worn look to add to the texture.  A chipboard swirl covered with gesso and a single ply napkin that wrinkled on contact, three handmade material/ribbon flowers with pearls, two pearl flowers, a strip of lace and nylon wires threaded with pearls all contribute to different textures on the page. 

I have to tell you that gesso on distressed corrugated cardboard is my favourite background to work on,