Building Your Personal Style | Part 1

[New Masters Academy]

In this video lesson, we are pleased to bring you recordings from an NMA Workshop with Bill Perkins from February 2014. In this workshop, Bill tackles the intimidating and complex subject of building one’s own personal style. In this first part, Bill gives an introduction to understanding style and how we as a society as well as individually develop our own sense of what we find aesthetically appealing. You will learn the importance of understanding various art forms throughout history, and how to create visual connotation with your work to create a story. This lesson will conclude with an assignment to help you practice the concepts you have learned so far. Stay tuned for the release of the remaining parts of this workshop!

Materials

• General’s Charcoal Pencil
• CarbOthello Pencil – Black
• Letraset Marker Paper

[bart]

Hi,

are there more parts coming? I see this was a year ago the last message was posted. Also, I should be able to download a file, but there is no ‘resource’ tab or anyplace I can download the needed imagery for the exercises.

Thanks in advance for the reply, Bart

[ManuelFernandez]

**Building Your Personal Style | Part 1 w/ Bill Perkins**

chronological timeline
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**Notes**

**Intro to Visual Literacy**

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Flat mass/ shape

Forms/rendering of light vs shadown

Line / texture

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Visual arts should be treated as just another language – I see Math the same way – and it is used to communicate, feelings, and ideas like a written language with its own set of components and their relationships. So we gotta think of grammar in art? You don’t often put verbs before subjects or breaks too frequently, so think about that when you draw.

[Slide 2](https://i.imgur.com/rmw2Wcm.png)

As society has advanced, our modes of communication have accelerated. Along with new artistic directions and different methods. However, the principles have not changed.

With this information overload we gotta become more visually literate so we can communicate clearly and understand things.

recommendation: 1941 Maitland Graves “the Art of Color and Design” – he lists the elements of design, line, value, shape, proportion, color, direction, and texture.

**Important quote**

Bruce Block presented and wrote a book called **The Visual Story** (1988?) – he talks about line, tone, color, shape, space, rhythm, and movement.

**A Primer to Visual Literacy** (1973)

Visual elements are not the same as the medium. We are looking at dot, line, shape, direction, tone, color, texture, dimension, scale, and movement.

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**Workshop activities**

* The visual matrix
* Primaries of Design
* The Line, Mass, Form principles
* Visual components
* Line, tone, color, shape, space, rhythm, transitions
* Methods of Measure
* Major Key-proportion
* Minor Key-range of contrast

So part of the initial presentation is coming to the same words and understanding their definition.

For example in the subject of color, people might use the words

**hue :: chroma :: color**;

**value :: tone :: light**;

**saturation :: brightness :: brilliance**.

So we want to define our terms and create our own terminology of common ground. Funny enough we have the same dilemma or challenge in the Instructional Design or in socialist theory! Words have meaning!

This isn’t a how to make images but studying the components of image making!

[ManuelFernandez]

**Building Your Personal Style | Part 1 w/ Bill Perkings, Ch 3.**

Since kindergarden we are being asked to recognize patterns.

This exercise was meant to look for similar shapes and different. Repeating patterns. It is the basis for a lot of concepts.

Learning to read, we escalate to other symbols – A B C D E…
Learning numbers, we look at 1 2 3 4 5…

We are building a vocabulary of symbols. Which are letters which are numbers. Next we learn about order.

Order/Value what is something compared to something else.

3 < 8 (the < becomes a symbol of “less than”) 5 > 2

Patterns
Symbols
Orders

This is the essence not just for reading, and math; but also for image making. Art however has its own language, characteristics and dynamics. A lot of artists have devoted time to breaking things down into harmonous basic principles like pre-mixed colors.

The important thing to keep in mind: visual language components do not have a predetermined *meaning* until you put other things next to it. A line is a line until you have a line and a curve.

Looking for patterns helps us finds rhythms and patterns into our images.

Identifying symbols to add to our visual library and create connections and connotations.

Value, creating dominance or subordination in our image making by making one thing bigger in relations to another.

**Note break: following along with instructor**

[Cuong pho]

Hello could we have the correction of the assigment please ?

At the end of the lesson.

[Babita Saxena]

I am unable to find the downloadable image he wants us to draw. Help please?

[Daniel Daigle]

Hi Babita, The image is in the references tab underneath the video 🙂

[Hanan Youssef]

The minute I overthink notan and chiarascuro I don’t understand again

• This reply was modified 2 years, 2 months ago by Hanan Youssef.

[Ethel]

It would be great to be able to see the assignment completed correctly so we can compare our own & see what we may have done wrong.

Do the instructors participate in these discussions?

[Author]

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