Believe in Tomorrow ~ Aurora Gardening

Hi everyone! I'm delighted to share the tag I created for the current challenge at The East Wind. The theme is Embossing ~ Wet or Dry and the entire DT played with the new image, Aurora Gardening, which is the freebie in this month's newsletter for those who subscribe. I won't go into all of the details of how I created the background because you can get all of that on my personal blog post.

What I do want to talk about is a quick little lesson on creating flow in a project, regardless of what form the art takes. Flow is what helps a viewer's eye move through the piece so that the entire project can be read as one before someone zooms in on specific details. It prevents the person from getting stuck in one place on the composition. I want to highlight a couple of ways that I used flow on this tag.

By repeating the colours on the ribbons and layered flowers as well as repeating the round shape of the navy blue buttons, I have encouraged the eye to move from the top of the tag through it to the bottom. The eye looks for similarities within the design so it automatically moves from one to the other. The bits of orange, yellow, and blue in the image create repetition. Had I left the bottom flower off, though, the eye would have become stuck on the image and missed the rest of the tag and sentiment. Repeating those colours within the sentiment has the same effect.

Another tip I wanted to point out is that the butterfly brings a little of that brown colour from the bottom half of the background to the very top, again creating repetition and flow. The eye naturally moves around the tag to find similarities.

The last little thing I wanted to point out is the visual triangle I created with my colouring of the image. The three pops of orange from her hair ornament to the watering can to the carrot create a triangle which moves the eye around the image so that you don't miss a single detail.

Thanks for visiting today. I hope that I gave you a couple of things to think about when you are considering why a design is working...or not. Sometimes the addition of a little detail helps the flow and changes the feel of the entire design.

Bonnie