#expressionalism

At first CFS made it challenging to keep doing art, it was an adjustment to learn to do art in breif periods.

This painting is of how the condition weighed on me.

I made the cinderblocks feel like concrete by adding grit into my painting medium. In a way of letting others "feel" the painting. I hope you like it!

In the 1920 German Expressionist film Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, lines are used to create a bizarre, contorted world. While diagonal lines commonly go towards vanishing points, the majority of diagonal lines in this film are used as a tool to warp normal objects such as windows in order to convey the idea that the world that the audience is seeing is truly twisted. In addition, the use of crisp explicit lines form unusual, jagged shapes that overlap each other and create a sense of anxiety. Lastly, the contour lines of actors’ silhouettes add to the idea of an unhinged world as it creates a divide between the set and characters. It makes you feel like you are looking at the world through the eyes of a madman; the people are real but how the world around them is being viewed is distorted. 

This movie is visually stunning and I recommend everyone, especially designers, to watch it.

Glossary

Lines: They have both a direction and a length. Line means a mark, streak, stroke, slash, path, stripe, border, contour, striation, course, route, and track. Curved, bent, thick, wide, broken, vertical, horizontal, burred, or freehand, lines delineate shapes, forms, and spaces, volumes, edges, movement and patterns. Not only that – lines create both 2D and 3D objects and figures. Lines are awesome and powerful.

Contour lines: They indicate the edge around an object or the changes in volume within an object. Contour lines dramatize changes of plane within the form. The curve of a belt around the waist is a contour line.

Diagonal lines: They are useful to draw the eye into a composition such as toward the vanishing points.  Three common types of diagonals are 1) actual diagonal lines 2) objects placed diagonally in a scene 3) a diagonal line created by the viewpoint such as the Dutch tilt.

Dutch Tilt (known as a Dutch angle, canted angle, or oblique angle): It is a type of camera shot that  has a noticeable tilt on the camera’s “x-axis.” The Dutch tilt camera technique was introduced by German Expressionists in the 1920s — so it’s not actually Dutch. Directors often use a Dutch angle to signal to the viewer that something is wrong, disorienting, or unsettling.

Explicit: It means clear, direct, and obvious. If a drawing is easy to read it may be that the lines are explicit, clean, with efficient use of variety. There are explicit lines around the frame of the Dutch Tilt illustration.

Gesture lines: They capture motion, such as in an action pose when gesture drawings are used in storyboards.

Implied lines: In 3-D scenes, it is a line in a scene that is not physically there but is suggested by points in the art. Implied lines suggest the edges of an object or planes within an object. The line may be broken such as a dotted line, it may be defined by value, color, or texture, or it may not be visible at all. With implied lines, our brain interprets that a line exists.

Line As Value has a long history. Artists have used line drawings to create value, or shading, and to achieve the impression of volume.

Line of action: It is an imaginary line that extends through the main action of the figure. When you draw an action figure you can capture the line of action on one layer then draw the figure drawing on another layer.

Line quality: It is the expressive essence of lines. Varying the line quality makes objects appear more 3-dimensional and exciting. Range in line quality heightens descriptive and suggestive potential. A single line can change in darkness and width, can vanish altogether to mentally reconnect later on an edge.

Line weight: This refers to the thickness or thinness of a line.

Lost and Found Lines: We don’t really need a strong contour line around every part of an object because our brain will fill in the blank where the edge disappears. When a line fades out and then restarts further along the edge it is called a lost and found line.