Seeing Big Shapes

We know that we should work with the big shapes first, before getting into those tiny details. But it can be a little tricky learning how to do that. I'm Katie Lydiard. Let's talk about how we can train our eye just a little bit easier so that we can get those big massive shapes to work together before we get caught up in those tiny details that really make our pieces sparkle. I have a really simple demonstration here.

It's a photograph, um, of these horses that's in a transparency page protector, um, and then I have just a dry erase marker. And what this is going to allow me to do is to make marks on here that I can easily wipe off. So you can see this picture here is just a little blurry, and that's on purpose. I wanted to make sure that I'm not getting caught up in all of these small things. So I took it into Photoshop and I blurred out the whole thing, and then I can, you know, print it off, and now I have it in the transparency, and now I can really focus on how do I want to break this down.

If I'm out in the field, I'm going. I have to mentally work through how I break down the scene, especially if it's live animals, they're going to be moving, right? So I, if I can prepare as much as I can before I go out, how I visually break down a scene, then while I'm out there in the field doing my studies, I'll have a lot easier time getting a great study done. So, with this picture, what I can do is I can start to see what my big shapes are, my big masses. Obviously, I have the sky here that's broken up with these trees.

I have this line. And I do have these houses, but I don't necessarily need to worry about those because they kind of more or less go into the mass of the trees, or at least I'm considering them at this point as part of the mass of the trees. And then as the foreground moves forward. I have kind of this middle ground here into the foreground here. So I have my sky, my background, my middle ground, and then my foreground here.

And of course my subject, the horses, how would I break these up? This is a very complex set of shapes. So what I can do is say, OK, what are my big angles? I have this down to here. I have this overall angle, this overall angle.

That, and that there, that encompasses kind of envelope shapes. My whole subject, right? And then from there, I can start cutting into that envelope. I can cut in there. Start to cut in for the backs of the horses.

Get that neck and his face. The legs a little bit. And then from there, obviously I have that a little bit more cut in, I can erase. My bigger lines so that I can see my smaller lines a bit better. Now I can separate the horses individually.

And from there I can start getting these. Shadow shapes. There are some really clear shadow shapes on these horses, which is nice because that will do a lot of describing as far as form and anatomy, and can get some of these hooves. A bit more specific on. Some of these contours.

And now I have this overall huge shape broken down into much more manageable shapes. I could even, at this point, grab some paint and start kind of filling in on top of this transparency. It's a really great tool. To be able to not only work on seeing those bigger shapes, but color matching and you know, just practicing the act of mixing and applying your paint. It will be a lot more slick of a surface to paint on than, say, a canvas, but it's still a great tool to kind of learn some steps into being able to see your big shapes and applying some paint.

So I hope this is helpful. Please get some photographs and use this tool, this exercise, to be able to see your big shapes for your photos.