OUIL404 Visual Language- Drawing with Shape

The use of shape within my own practice has never been something I have considered to be seperate to anything else I have been doing. However, through properly investigating different practitioners I have considered more and more significant differences that drawing with shape can produce.

Typically the use of shape creates a really graphic aesthetic. The use of flat, block colours can create a really simple look if used sparingly, however by using some complex shapes and colours some really interesting and complex images.

Eleni Kalorkoti creates intriguing characters using simple shapes, built up to create detailed images but still keeping a simple aesthetic. Eleni also uses a lot of textures within her shapes which definitely takes away from the graphic look and gives it a more handmade feel.


James Graham really goes to town on keeping his work simple, a large proportion of his work heavily features black, solid tones; which makes his work look incredibly graphical. The main way he uses shape is to create a silhouette of an image with nagative colours for the the outline and details. I really like how these images look.



Keeping this idea of shape and texture in mind, I worked on my own practice to create images which reflect this idea. I decided to create images of objects which had varying shapes to work away from a look which may be seen as too simplistic. I decided to create layers which look to create an almost 3D look whilst using flat colours.

The first set of images I created was eyes and lips, I really enjoy drawing eyes anyway so this seemed a good starting point; as well as that, eyes, and the area around the eyes, can be quite complex when looked at. I chose to stick with mainly flat colours, and avoided using tone as this would distract from the use of block shapes, creating the idea of tone through different weights to the tones used in the seperate blocks.



The second set of images I decided to create utilised a lot more texture in the shapes to create a more interesting image. I decided to focus on loose clothing, which gave me the opportunity to use more interesting shapes in the image. The use of texture suggests the idea of material and an actual texture on the clothing. 
I really enjoyed using shape and textured shapes, it made a nice change from the way I usually work, mostly with line and line used for tone. I think the only downside of using shape is it does have the danger of looking too graphical.