Elements of Art: Line

Line

noun: A long, narrow mark or band.

ActualImpliedGeometricOrganicHorizontalVerticalDiagonal

DescriptiveExpressiveFlatWideCurvingGestural

Task: Take your sketchbook/journal and record as many kinds of line as you can. Make quick sketches of them and note where you found them.

Task: Experiment with lines. Fill a page with as many kinds of lines as you can, using different colours and different media, i.e. pencil, crayon, watercolour, paint, marker, pastel.

Lines made by fingerprinting. Unique to you.

Create an image from the lines of a fingerprint?

Lines in Nature

Looking closer at flowers I noticed a lot more lines that I had before.

I decided to create a flower entirely made of lines using the brush tool.

Using the 'layer' element of photoshop I was able to have a blown-up copy of the line drawing as a background, reducing the opacity to make sure the flower really stands out.

Locking the layers of the flower in the foreground I was able to use the brush tool to add the thicker, dark lines, making the colours where they cross the flower more vibrant. I also reduced the opacity of the black lines so that you can see the exploded image of the flower in the background through them.