Pattern and texture

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Pattern and Texture

• Pattern begins with a unit or shape that is repeated. This unit is called a Motif

• Most patterns can be reduced to a grid of some sort, and the result is a crystallographic balance or order.

M.C. Escher. Pattern Drawing (detail). Hexagon repeat. M.C. Escher’s Symmetry Drawing

Pattern and texture-differences

• It is difficult to draw a strict line between texture and pattern. Pattern is usually defined as a repetitive design, with the same motif appearing again and again. Texture, too, often repeats, but its variations usually do not involve such perfect regularity. The difference in the two terms is admittedly slight.

Pattern and Texture

• The essential distinction between texture and pattern seems to be whether the surface arouses our sense of touch or merely provides designs appealing to the eye.

Pattern and Texture

Texture

• Texture refers to the surface quality of objects. Texture appeals to our sense of touch. Even when we do not actually feel an object, our memory provides a sensory reaction or sensation of touch.

Texture

Categories of Texture

• There are two categories of artistic texture—tactile and visual.

Categories of Texture

• Architecture and sculpture have what is called tactile texture (or actual texture)—this is texture that can actually be felt. In painting, the same term describes an uneven paint surface, produced when an art- ist uses thick pigment (a technique called impasto) to create a rough, three-dimensional paint surface.

Actual or Tactile Texture

Actual or Tactile Texture

Categories of Texture

• Texture that is created to look like something it is not, is called visual or implied texture.

Implied texture

Verisimilitude and Trompe L’oeil

• In painting, artists can create the impression of texture on a flat, smooth painted surface. This is called verisimilitude, or an appearance that is “truly the same.” By reproducing the color and value patterns of familiar textures, painters encourage us to see textures where none actually exist. Visual texture is the impression of texture as purely visual; it cannot be felt or enjoyed by touch.

Versimilitude

Frottage_a technique in the visual arts of obtaining textural effects or images by rubbing lead, chalk, charcoal, etc., over

paper laid on a granular or relieflike surface.

Frottage

Frottage

Trompe L’oeilliterally translated as “To fool the eye”