#lady-tempest

----

I actually group a lot of my art theories into sets of two (I mentioned Active/Passive before over here). They’re by no means concrete, Correct, or otherwise uh??? idk I’m not very good at anything okay!!

Flow, for me, is paired with Falter and I think about them a lot!

let’s take this?? rabbit thing I just drew for this as an example.

(sorry if this is hard to read for colorblind people and/or people in general ;;; I’ll summarize in text anyway)

Flow is created by long, smooth lines, semi-parallels, and natural curves. It creates motion, and the eyes move over flowy shapes easily. It can be used to lead eyes to locations, as with a lot of zen painting, but it doesn’t lend very much intrigue into a piece by itself.

Falter is created with crossing lines, short lines, sudden changes and general stops in a picture. It creates focal points, tension points, and a gives you more of an Active vibe because of the conflict between lines. You can concentrate them at focal points to help the viewer look in the right spot, but I’m not that into that in general. Without Flow, Falter falls into a pattern and just becomes clustered noise.

------

That’s the basic of it, but?? that doesn’t actually answer the question of what Flow is, but to answer it reasonably I’m going to have to!! use math. so beware!!

We, in general, are very in tune to changes, and more importantly, changes of changes (acceleration)! If changes happen too suddenly, it means they’ve accelerated in a way we found unpredictable and frightening, like a car slamming its breaks or turning the wheel too quickly. (we can feel the derivative of things very easily)

You can see in the wiggly example above, we can still do a lot of changes as long as they changes themselves are happening gradually!

Smooth lines, and thus Flow, are made by changing things gradually with simple vectors. All the things with X’s on them are not Bad, they are just full of Falter because of the rapid change of motion.