Texture in Art
Texture in Art
Texture simply means how something feels when it is touched. If you touched a piece of marble, it might feel smooth and cold. A piece of wood would feel rough. A piece of cloth or a tapestry might feel rough or smooth.
Artists use texture in their art to help tell a story and to add dimension to a piece. When you see a piece of art, the texture can add to your enjoyment of the piece if you are able to touch it. Texture can make a work of art more interesting.
Actual or Tactile Texture
Some artists use a variety of materials to add a real texture to their artworks. This is often called tactile texture, or actual texture, because you can really feel the texture when you touch it.
For example, an artist may put pieces of stone onto a smooth ceramic vase to make the surface rough and bumpy. Heavy layers of paint or sand added to paint can make the surface of a painting feel rough. A sculpture might use a polished stone finish that feels slippery, smooth, and cool.
Collage is one art medium that has tactile texture. Collages are made by gluing pieces of paper, fabric, and other objects, such as feathers, beads, wood, photographs, yarn, and seeds, to a background. Because they are made of so many different items, collages are full of tactile texture.
Tapestries, which are pictures made of fabrics and threads, also have a lot of tactile texture. Sculptures can be made of many materials, but often have a great deal of actual texture.
Implied or Visual Texture
Sometimes artwork doesn't actually have texture, but artists make it look as if it does. A drawing may be absolutely flat and smooth to the touch, but can look like it should have a texture to it. This is called implied texture, or visual texture. Many times, implied texture is added to a flat artwork through the use of lines, angles, and shading.
One way that artists create texture is to use a technique called hatching. By drawing closely spaced parallel lines, artists can create shading in a drawing or a print. Crosshatching is when artists draw many lines to fill in an area of a drawing or print. Unlike hatching, the lines in crosshatching are not all parallel.
Using many differently sized dots to fill in an area is another way that artists can add texture. This process is called stippling if the dots are all the same color. If the dots are several colors, the process is called pointillism.