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[ 89 ]if you see any meaning in it. Look
at it as a simple graphic and pick
out a few examples of each word.
Where would you draw bal-
ance lines? How would you note
relationships? Mark up the blank
layer with your ideas. Use what-
ever color scheme, symbols, and
lines that make sense to you.
For balance, you might immedi-
ately be drawn to considering the
clear symmetries. I chose to look
at the placement of the moon in
the lower left. Balance requires a
distribution of weight, so I placed
a dotted line to show where I feel
like balance is placed with respect
to the moon. The blue strokes note
leading lines from the lightning
toward the moon. Notice that the
red vertical line is skewed slightly
toward the left of actual center,
leaving a more open area in the
lower right.
Weight isn’t just about the size
of objects. It can include color,
value, texture, detail, sharpness,
etc. When you think about bal-
ance, ask yourself what has weight
in a scene? Try choosing just one
version of weight and take a visual
walk around an image to see how
that feature is represented. Is it
evenly distributed? Is there visual
weight to otherwise empty space?
Turn off the markup layer and
add a Black & White adjustment
layer. Does your perception of bal-
ance change at all? Play with the
color sliders and see how distribu-
tion of weight might change as
colors are translated into differ-
ent shades of gray. In this version,
I crushed the Cyans and Blues to
black, and blew out the Yellows to
nearly pure white in the Properties panel (Window>Properties). Toggling the black-
and-white version on/off clearly changes the balance and impact of weight.
The purpose of this exercise is not to be right or wrong; it’s to get your brain
churning on the ideas, which we’ll turn into energy momentarily.A Storm marked upA Storm in B&W