hello everybody in this video we're going to talk about the principles of design the principles of design arranged the elements of art into a composition so if you watched my previous video on the elements of art you would have heard that the elements of art are a lot like the ingredients of a recipe well the principles of design are like the instructions are the directions for a recipe so you might have all the ingredients but that doesn't mean you know what to do with them and that's where the principles of design come in you might ask yourself I don't even know what a composition is well I'm here to tell you don't worry composition is the way an artwork is arranged so basically it's where everything is placed in an artwork and in what manner so there are a few compositional tools that we can use actually there's a lot of them but the biggest ones that we talk about what happened to be the rule of thirds so here we have an image by the master printer Hokusai and we're going to use this image to describe the rule of thirds perhaps you may have noticed in your camera when you're trying to shoot a picture sometimes you see the little grid of lines that appear on your picture kind of like this well what you are seeing when that shows up is the rule of thirds so for example in the rule of thirds we state that objects of interest should fall into these sort of intersecting areas of the grid and these intersections are generally going to be a lot more interesting compositionally than something smack dab in the center so if we look at the image by Hokusai we see the largest part of the wave breaking over this intersection point we see the mountain near this intersection another section of wave at this intersection so we notice that the movement of the piece kind of carries it through in this sort of grid-like fashion and that's just one way of looking at composition there's also the golden ratio and all kinds of other compositional elements but we're going to keep it simple with just talking about the rule of thirds to show us a little bit about composition so now that we know about composition we can start talking about the principles of design so the first principle that we're going to talk about is movement so movement is the path that the viewers eye takes through an artwork and that's often to the areas of focus so a lot of time movement can be directed along lines or edges so if we look at this picture here we can see these sort of lines of the stairwell kind of moving us through in sort of a spiral fashion through the composition the edges of the stair and these sorts of shapes also help direct us kind of into this focal area you can also see these shapes - kind of pulling us in from the edges of the piece all towards this Center area we can also use colors shapes and other elements to help us move our eye through an image the next element we're going to talk about is balance and what that means is the visual weight of each element is distributed in a way that makes the composition feel stable so what that means is you could think of your artwork as an actual scale so let's talk about the different types of balance first we have symmetrical balance so if you think of the word symmetry symmetry is when things are the same so symmetrical balance the artwork could be divided in half and both sides would look the same so here we have a couple examples of symmetrical artworks in the picture of Kerry James Marshall it's almost like when you put lots of paint together a sheet and fold it in half and pull it apart it's the same on both sides he just continued to add a little bit extra to it and then if we look at the Brooklyn Bridge very symmetrical if you stand in the middle of it any symmetrical balance is a different type so when we add the prefix a on to something it means not so a symmetrical means is not symmetrical it's a type of balance in which the two sides of the artwork are different but they still feel stable so this one's a little harder to explain because it's not so visually apparent but if we look at these two images here we can feel that they you know are well composed the composition is interesting but it doesn't feel like it's lopsided by any means so if we look at this photograph by Sebastian Salgado we still have a lot of like movement in the piece and it brings your eye kind of throughout the composition even though it's heavier over here with people the large intensity of the landscape here kind of helps balance out the people whereas in this abstract photograph by Paul strand he is balancing out light and shadow using just different values and then also different shapes that are sort of cut in so if we were to kind of put in that you know rule of thirds here there'd be points of interest kind of where we see these lines falling so that's going to make it more interesting our next element of art is unity so unity can also be called harmony it's another term and that would be when we use similar or repeated elements in an artwork to create consistency so we might see repeated marks or a similar mood or repeated colors or kind of a consistent theme throughout the artwork so here we have an image by romare bearden and although it may seem very chaotic with all these different sized people and images kind of collage together throughout the piece he's still using unity because he's got unity in the material and that is all collage there are similar values throughout so there's a lot of kind of medium gray values that kind of drag through the image we see repetition in the people throughout the image as well so he's using a variety of different things but they're all tied together with similar values and subject matter throughout now that leads us to the opposite of unity which is variety so where unity seeks to bring things together by being similar variety instead uses many different elements and when we use different elements that helps us create interest or contrast in an artwork the artists collective meow wolf makes some pretty insane sort of adventurous installations in the southwestern United States so let's look at this image right here we can see a variety of colors there's kind of a cacophony of color if you will there's also a variety of shapes we see lots of geometric shapes we see more organic shapes happening there's variety in the textures that we're seeing as well and we also see kind of just a variety of subject matter even as we're looking through this so this shows a lot of different elements all being put together to create a lot of interest our next principle of design is rhythm and rhythm would be repeating elements in order to create a feeling of organized movement so if you think about rhythm usually we think of music we think of a beat right so generally when we think of rhythm in art it also kind of gives us sort of a feeling of a beat to it almost so if we look at Marcel Duchamp descending this stairwell here he is repeating himself over and over and turn over again as he moves down and so we get this feeling of motion of him kind of moving throughout and that repetition of him going down creates sort of like a rhythm as he's moving if we look at Aboriginal art there is a lot of rhythm to it you can almost feel it pulsing with energy with these different sized dots so there's tiny ones medium big ones some of them have outlines around them which gives them sort of an energy and we would consider that rhythm similar to rhythm is pattern in that we're still talking about repetition so that would include a repeated design we see patterns all around us some of my favourite artists that use pattern would be Gustav Klimt and Lina iris Victor they do actually have kind of similar patterns throughout these paintings so here we can see kind of the repeated I shape within a triangle up the dress there's repeated triangles here repeated squares swirly circles little checkers he's sort of like halved circle shapes so there's lots and lots of patterns going on in this painting same with over here like lots of repetitive concentric circles and Chevron sort of designs triangles lines so pattern can be used to create interest and it can also be used to help unify an image by repeating things all right now we're going to kind of move away from repetition and talk more about size so the next two principles of design involves size scale tells us about the comparison of one object to another in terms of size so here we'll look at two examples of size if we look at this painting of Yosemite we see the scale of the animals here compared to the massive rock formations in the background and that gives us kind of an idea of how big these mountains are compared to the animals or vice versa and if we look at this giant rubber ducky by Florentine Hoffman here we're seeing an example of exaggerated scale so he's taking something that is normally quite small which is a rubber ducky and then blowing it up to a massive scale to kind of show some contrast and it makes it much more attention-grabbing when we're exaggerating scale a similar element is proportion so proportion and scale are very very similar scale remember it talks about comparing one thing to another thing so two separate things right proportion is more of a ratio so when we talk about proportion we're comparing parts of a whole in terms of size so if you think of a ratio you might think like one third or you know one to two that sort of thing generally what helps me remember that proportions are about parts of a whole as I think about facial proportions so I'm comparing part of my face to another part of my face as we can see in like these Leonardo da Vinci drawings he's dividing up the face into sections and kind of comparing sizes throughout to figure out where facial features belong on the face and like I showed you the rubber ducky with exaggerated scale here we're going to see some exaggerated proportions in these sculptures by Gerardo felstein so here you know he's clearly exaggerating these feet making them really massive compared to the rest of the body so he is using proportions because the feet are a part of the body which is the whole right so we're comparing parts of a whole emphasis is just like when you emphasize a word it's the same in art emphasis is what we focus on on an artwork and it's usually largest or most detailed area so when we look at these images here in this painting by Ben Grasso we want to see what grabs your attention right away what's the first thing you see that would be the emphasis so for me I would have to say it's probably the light of the explosion happening at the center of this building or if we look at Rene Magritte obviously by making the head detached from the body and also spherical and orange he is emphasizing this really large shape here as evidenced by the size and the color and kind of the context and that it doesn't quite make sense so when we think about context of things not really fitting in we can talk about contrast anytime we talk about contrast think of like comparing and contrasting something we talk about difference so contrast is the amount of difference between elements and we have a few different types of contrasts so we could talk about contrast between color or lines or shapes or values or textures but we're going to talk more specifically about value contrast because there are a few more terms that fit with it so value contrast obviously would be the amount of difference between values so having light and dark right if you remember from the elements of art value is the lightness or darkness of something so there are two types of value contrasts that we're going to talk about there's high contrast and low contrast so what's the difference between the two well high contrast means there's a large difference between the lightest and darkest areas the edges tend to look harder when you have a big difference between light and dark values so for example black and white are opposite values so generally when you see things that are like very stark black and white that would be high contrast low contrast is the opposite so there's not much difference between the lightest and darkest areas which tends to make the edges look softer so for example we might have values that are similar to each other you know maybe middle grades or maybe they're all light values or all dark values so when your values are really close to one another and similar it's going to not jump out at you quite so much it's going to be a little more subtle when you look at it so the image on the left here is actually a close-up of a human iris just kind of freaky when you think about it a little too much but if we look at this image it shows a great example of high contrast so here we see super dark black which would be our darkest value and that is right next to some bright lights so when the bright whites are right next to the super dark blacks those are going to kind of pop at you more because they're so different from one another and that is what would create high contrast whereas if we look at this image by yonder oop it's all kind of similar values in that these sort of yellows and and mobs and oranges they're all pretty close to one another in value kind of all in the middle so this image would be more of an example of low contrast when your values are close to one another now the next and final type of contrast and the last thing I'm going to talk about today is juxtaposition and juxtaposition is probably one of my favorite words unfortunately it's very overplayed in the art world but just look at that word think of all the Scrabble points you can get I almost spelled that word in Scrabble the other day and it was magical I had juxtapose so close or half way there I mean it's super close anyway that would have been like a million scrambled points but okay sorry getting distracted about words but juxtaposition is combining two or more unlike things to show contrast it's one of my favorite things because it can often be very funny or it could be startling and usually juxtaposition tends to grab your attention because it's showing such very different things put together so let's look at this example of some really interesting architecture so we're seeing a juxtaposition of old and new and we also see a juxtaposition of material so we have like this old stone facade of the building here juxtaposed with the sleek metal and glass of this new building so we're jaxxed opposing material we're just opposing sort of the idea of it you know like I said old and new we're also juxtaposing shape so you know this is very stoic and you know strong looking whereas this side of the building is super futuristic it's almost like a crystal that's grown from the ground so very very different in a lot of different elements but all in all those would be the principles of design so hopefully learning about them will help you better be able to understand artwork as you were looking at it and as you're creating it thanks for watching