A digital lesson about Futurism andvisual movement

in art

2005 Pearson Publishing

Once upon a time there was a group of artists called the Futurists.

They started up as a formal group in 1909 in Italy. They had many interesting and strange ideas about the world and about art.

The main Futurists were Filippo Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini.

One of the most important Futurist ideas was that art should celebrate the power and energy of machines, since, in 1909, this stood for the progress of the human race towards an amazing future.

They came up with ways to solve the problem of showing this energy in paintings and sculptures, which of course generally don’t move at all. However, paintings and sculptures can show visual movement or visual energy.

This is the focus for this lesson.

It’s easy to think like a Futurist – especially if you can ride a bike. Energy is passed into a machine – speed – energy – danger!

So I got on my bike and pedalled as fast as I could, to experience exactly what this is like ...

This idea came from seeing Umberto Boccioni’s painting, ‘The Dynamism of a Cyclist’.

This is my starting point – the engine of my bike – where the

energy of my body is changed into speed and movement.

My first step is to use the brightness and contrast options.

I’ve increased the contrast and darkened the image to create a more dramatic effect.

Now I’ve used the magic wand selection tool to select a big

section of white shapes. I’ve copied and pasted these shapes on

top of the picture and moved them to the left and down a little.

I’ve pasted them a second time

to start to create an impression

of movement in the design.

To get away from the ‘bike in my garden’ colour scheme, I’ve used

the invert option. This has reversed all the colours and turned

light to dark.

This slide illustrates one of the most powerful commands in modern image manipulation software. This is the use of

layers.

Here is the tool panel

which displays the

two layers.

I’ve copied the whole picture and pasted it as a new layer on top of the

image as it was just before I inverted it.I’ve moved the top

layer to the right and down a little,

using the move tool.

I’ve used the layer controls to set

the top layer transparency to 50%.

This allows the shapes to become much richer and more complex. It’s getting closer to

the energetic effect of movement

that I’m trying to create.

I’ve used the paint bucket

tool to pour red paint into

some of the key shapes.

I’ve also flattened the layers into

one image. This makes it easier to work with a single image

again.

This change is made by using a paint effect filter.

It has simplified the shapes

but made the impact of the

design much stronger!

To complete this stage, I’ve simply used the crop

tool to cut off the edges.

I’ve decided to experiment a little more! This filter is called find edges.

I’ve put a find edges layer over the previous stage, and

made it transparent once again.

This is definitely a stage where something has to get worse before it gets better!

I’ve flattened the layers, inverted the

colour and then cropped the image.

This definitely does the job! Complex shapes, rich colours

and textures, and a sense of movement in the design!

I still really like this stage though. Good job I saved it!

One of the great advantages

of digital work is that you can experiment with many

more possibilities, and much

more quickly than you ever could with paints or other

traditional materials.

If you save work as you

are changing it, you can easily created a

whole variety of beautiful

images from relatively simple starting points.

Let’s see that again without the captions.

Just watch how the picture develops.

Thank you for following this lesson.

Now it’s time for you to try out some of these ideas!