Visual Texts
Visual Texts
Viewing skills are important and need to be well-developed. Skills are required in interpreting and decoding visual messages.Representing skills are also important in creating effective visual messages.
Viewing is different from simply looking. To look at something is to be passive, whereas to view is to be active. To view is to look, to see, to analyze, and to interpret what you see. It is, above all, to be aware of what you're looking at and what message the visual text conveys.
To be visually literate is an important skill, especially as we are in a society that is built on the economics of the advertising world. Skills in determining what is important to people and what will relate to people effectively are huge aspects of our society today.
Visual artists who draw and paint use a variety of strategies to communicate their feelings, moods, and ideas. Some techniques that they use are distance and perspective, viewpoint, composition, and tone.
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Visual images are found everywhere: people's facial expressions, body gestures, postures, photographs, road signs, billboard, drawings, television shows, movies, comics, advertisements, architecture, clothing, the Internet, and on and on. You see these messages, but do you view them critically?
Distance and perspective relate to where the focal point for the visual text is in relation to the horizon line—whether it is in the background or the foreground. Visual artists try to develop a feeling of depth in their visuals, which creates different nuances of mood, and tone.
Composition, an important element in perspective, refers to the arrangement and placement of the subject matter in a visual. The focal point may be positioned high or low, left or right, in the centre, or close or far, and other elements of
the visual surround the subject as effectively as possible.
Tone and colour are also elements that create different effects in a visual. Different feelings, or emotions, are created in the minds of the viewer, whether the visual is in black and white, or has splashes of different colours.