Everything you wanted to know about

Texture & Pattern

Texture is how something feels, or looks like it should feel. It’s the surface quality of an object. The two kinds of texture we will be talking about are ACTUAL and IMPLIED.

Implied texture is the illusion of real texture. Artists such as Andrew Wyeth used implied texture to simulate real environments.

Sometimes artists take implied texture to an extreme and they use the “trompe l’oei” technique, which is french for “fool the eye.”

Artists such as Gary Schumer and Dennis Wojtkiewicz use texture in such a detailed way the viewer thinks that the objects are real, and not painted.

Gary Schumer

Dennis Wojkiewicz

Then there is actual texture, which is texture that you can actually feel. Artists such as Yvonne-Parks Catchings and Se-Bo Park use the expressive qualities of texture to create interesting images without using recognizable images or shapes.

Yvonne Parks-Catchings

Se-Bo Park

Artist can create texture by using a PATTERN, which simply repeating elements over and over again. These students have used pattern to create the texture of skin. Pablo Picasso has used pattern to flatten and simplify the fur of the dog and feathers of the rooster.

Finally, artists can create a COLLAGE by attaching various textures to a single surface to make a more expressive image. One artist who did this quite frequently was Robert Rauschenburg, who was a “Pop” artist and used many found objects in his work.