In the colorful world of visual art, Colors and Lines are very important for showing how someone feels. Scientists at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium have done research on how colors and lines in art can make people feel. Let’s look at the colorful trip of feelings on canvas.
Colors and Lines: Painting Feelings Artists vs. Non-Artists
More than 80 students from the University of Toronto and the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD) took part in the project. The artists and non-artists in this class were told to make abstract pictures that showed six basic emotions: happiness, anger, disgust, sadness, fear, and wonder. What is the goal? To understand how lines and colors can be used to express feelings.
STEM Minds vs. Artists’ Palette
The artists were mostly 24 years old and had official art training. The people who were not artists were also 24 years old and were STEM students. The researchers wanted to find out if artists and non-artists show how they feel through color in different ways. The findings were surprising.
Colors and Lines: Decoding Feelings People vs. Computers
To make things more interesting, the researchers compared how well people could read feelings in drawings to how well a computer algorithm could do the same thing. What’s interesting is that the algorithm worked better with color drawings than with line sketches. These results show that both people and computers can understand how colors can show different feelings.
Freedom of expression and artistic freedom
Surprise: it was found that people who aren’t artists could express their feelings better than artists could. Why? When artists share their feelings, they often use artistic license, which adds variation and makes their feelings less conventional and harder to figure out. People who aren’t artists, on the other hand, keep things simple, which makes it easier to figure out how they feel.
Lines are less important than colors.
According to the study, colors can really show how we feel. Artists and non-artists alike were able to effectively communicate basic human feelings through the visual elements of their abstract drawings. The main point? We can, in fact, show how we feel through art.
Lines and Emotions: The Link You Can’t See
But color isn’t the only thing. The study finds an interesting connection between contour traits like long, smooth lines or short, sharp lines and how people feel. Anxious feelings are linked to angular lines that look like thorns or teeth, while happiness is linked to symmetry and repeating patterns.
Colors in Motion: The Link From Inside Out
Do you remember the movie Inside Out? Different colors were linked to different feelings, like red for anger and blue for sadness. The study found similar trends in the art of the people who took part. Like the characters in the movie, the way we show ourselves through art often follows basic color-emotion rules.
Faces with Color: Feelings in the Skin
Ever notice how our faces can change when we’re feeling something? Dirk Bernhardt-Walther, who is in charge of the study, says that the way our bodies show our feelings, like an angry red or purple face, matches how we express ourselves artistically. There’s an interesting link between how we feel inside and how we show it to others.
What Will Happen Next? Looking at colors with new eyes
The researchers want to find out how cultural and social experience changes how we think about color-emotion connections by doing the study again with children and people of different ages. We’ll keep going on our colorful journey as we look at the complex language of feelings through the bright colors of art.