If you’ve ever watched a tv episode where they show you how to arrange flowers, then you know they’re typically arranged in a visual trinagle. In scrapbooking you mainly hear about placing three embellishments in a visual triangle, but that’s not really what the floral designer means when she’s talking about flower arranging.
Triangles are a key design principle in every visual art from architecture to interior design, to landscaping, etc. Yet the triangles are not obvious and they don’t usually involve three embellishments, either.
So here are five design concepts that will expand your view of using visual triangles and all that you can do with them as you design your pages…
1. You can create a general overall triangle shape when layering papers, creating layered embellishment gatherings, or collaging items together.
2. In art and design, triangles are rarely exact so it can be confusing at first to see the triangle, even when it’s pointed out. Triangles in design and art are only triangles in a very general sense and are formed more by visual weight than exact lines.
3. When making a visual triangle with three items the way we commonly do in scrapbooking, your items don’t have to be the same. To create a triangle the items should just mimic each other in some way, meaning they should repeat at least one characteristic.
4. When your triangulated items are repeating a common characteristic, they pull your eyes from one to the other.
5. A visual triangle can have more than three items. The important thing is that your items are carrying your eyes in a general triangular shape, and that you have balance.
These concepts are freeing and will take your triangles from predictable to practically invisible. But they’re there, and they’re doing their job!
Shine on,
Noell
P.S.> Some of these concepts can be tricky to understand without examples. I wanted to share all of them with you because once you get them they give you more freedom and opportunities when creating, so I made a video tutorial that demonstrates all these concepts and more on a bunch of different scrapbook pages.
The video is for Paperclipping Members. Click here to learn about membership.
If you’re a member you can head over to the Member’s Area or iTunes to watch the video now!
Want to know how to get my videos? Click here! :)
Tags: design principles, principles of design, scrapbook, Scrapbooking, visual triangles