Use Interlocking Shapes to Transform Your Artistry

Whether you prefer to create abstract landscapes or purely expressionist abstract paintings, one thing is true: When you apply paint to your canvas, you are creating a shape. Shape is a critical part of composition: effective use of shapes can add weight and interest to your painting.

How Shapes Impact our Paintings

Shapes are distinguished by value, contrast, color, and how defined or undefined their outline edges are. Shapes include—and create—both the negative and positive space within a painting.

Create Interesting Shapes

Basic geometric shapes like squares or circles are less interesting to the eye than irregular, asymmetric shapes. If you’re painting an abstract landscape, consider everything in the painting as being a shape rather than thinking about what it represents: You may have an abstracted mountain shape as well as a shape created by a group of abstracted trees and a negative space shape created by the abstracted sky. 

You’ll want to use a variety of shape sizes and to use these small, medium, and large shapes to guide the viewer’s eye around the painting. Overlapping your shapes can also add a lot of interest!

Use Interlocking Shapes

When you look at a painting, imagine lines drawn all around the shapes. Do you have a jigsaw puzzle of shapes fitting neatly together, or is it more like a boring pile of plates?

For example, if you create a landscape with three same-sized horizontal stripes to represent sky, land, and water, it would be a very boring and amateurish landscape. But if you made the water a jagged, irregular shape that moves the viewer’s eye across the painting, it would become more interesting. Then you could add a shape on one side to represent a mountain or a group of trees. It’s getting more interesting! If you then used a stencil to apply textured shapes of white to the sky, it would get more complex still. 

Here’s an example of an abstract landscape I painted when I was prepping for my Colorful Abstract Landscapes with Caryl encounter. Even though there are very few shapes, notice how the shape of the groups of trees create an interlocking effect like the bulb on a puzzle piece. The “land shape” is much larger than the other shapes, so it has the heaviest weight. The tree shape is the darkest value, so it becomes the focal point. And the sky shape is broken up by white cloud shapes with blurry edges:

You may wonder how using interlocking shapes applies to abstract expressionist paintings, which don’t have recognizable subject matter. Think of creating varied, interlocking shapes created by color, as I’ve done in this painting:

Where did your eye go first? To the area of darkest value. And then your eye took a tour around the painting, seeing shapes of various sizes and with different levels of “edges” (some have soft, nebulous edges and others are more defined). Color and value support the variation of the shapes, and the overall effect is very pleasing.

How Are You Shaping Up?

I challenge you to create a small abstract painting with interlocking, varied, interesting shapes. I’d love to hear about how it goes!

Tell me in the comments!