Texture

Texture is an element of art which portrays the quality of a surface (how something feels or appears to feel) by using various techniques. Artists use texture (real or implied) to add interest and variety to pictures. This makes the viewer experience the art on two levels – one through your eyes and the other through your fingers (or what you expect you would feel if you touched the painting). This is why it is so tempting to touch pictures and sculptures at the museum!

Visual texture can be created using drawing techniques of stippling, hash marks, cross hatching, scribbling, broken lines, and repeating lines and shapes. When painting, artists use techniques such as dribbling, spattering, dry brushing, wet-on-wet among others.

Sample Projects

Rooster Wall Pocket (2nd Grade) art lesson.
Yarn and Foil Relief (3rd Grade) art lesson.
Printing With Nature (5th Grade) art lesson.
Make a “touch and feel” book. (Prepare scraps of interestingly textured cloth and pages of books so students can focus on what the fabric inspires them to create instead of making the book.)
Make a texture landscape by making a collage of different textured fabrics for lands, mountains, roads, sand, water, trees, etc.
Practice making different textures by using different lines. You might draw a smooth apple, a rough orange or a basketball for example.
Using crayons, color on rough grade sandpaper. Then iron it on to regular paper to create a uniquely textured drawing.
Using thick acrylic paint, do a small painting that uses impasto or other textural additives.
Make a mosaic picture using all sorts of objects with all sorts of textures.

Examples of Artists Using Texture:

Man Pointing, sculpture
Man Pointing, Giacometti, 1947.
Actual texture.

Summer, Arcimboldo, 1563.
Implied texture of the fruit, grains and vegetables which also mimic the texture of the man in the portrait.

Two Seated Figures, painting
Two Seated Figures, Kosoff, 1980.
Actual texture of the paint (look at the detail at right) called “Impasto.”

Wheatfield, Van Gogh, 1889, Impasto.

Borgund Church (Norway), 1150.
Texture fits in with surroundings.

Love Letters, Fragonard, 1771.
Smooth, wispy texture creates romantic world.

Still Life with Fruit, James Peale, 1824. Painter tried to imitate texture to the point where these seem entirely real.

Lunch in Fur, Oppenheim, 1936.
Ironic texture is the whole idea of this piece.

Mary Magdalene, Pedro DeMena, 1664. Texture used to accentuate the design.

Canopiclegerdomain, Nancy Graves, 1990. Texture as the design.

Little Dancer, Degas, 1881.
A real dress added to this bronze sculpture adds texture and interest.

Watching a Hippo Hunt, Egyptian, 2400 bc. Texture adds depth to this Egyptian design.

Banquet, Van Beyeren, 1620. Mastery of texture illusions. Very important in 17-18th c. Northern European Art.

Julian Schnabel, William Gaddis, 1987. Actual texture.

Button Tree, Gregory Mr. Imagination Warmack, 1990.
Texture as part of the design.

Harlequin and his Companions, Picasso, 1901. Impasto.

Marilyn, Audrey Flack, 1977. Modern version of ultra-realism achieved by the help of photography and new painting techniques such as airbrushing.

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