I have no trouble coming up with ideas and concepts that are the main focus of my artwork. I never have any creative blocks along those lines; there are just too many possibilities. But once I’ve decided to develop a piece, the background can often be more of a challenge than the foreground.

Sometimes all I have is a main object that will be the focus of the artwork. So then it’s a question of how to properly support it. What type of background should I use? Should it be crisp and clear or loose and somewhat nebulous? Should it appear to be spontaneous or should it look rigid and structured? An echo of the main object or something in direct contrast? Should it look regular or irregular? Should the object blend into a natural background or something artificial?

I try to avoid any cut-and-paste look to my art. I want any object to look like it belongs, like it’s a natural part of the entire artwork. Here’s an example of how I approached this problem with one piece of art.

“Gift of Love” is obviously one object, composed of what appears to be many little strips of metallic ribbons in the rough shape of a cartoon heart. Put in front of a plain background color it looked very stiff, cut-and-pasted, and artificial and hard. But in the final artwork the heart is both separate from the background and also tied in with it, and both crisp but soft. It’s striking, yet appealing. It looks like a setting that befits the main focus, the heart.

I achieved the tie-in by using a soft graduated blue background, the blue having been lifted from the blue color of the ribbons. That wasn’t enough. So I added some red borrowed from the ribbons into the entire area behind the heart (and in front of the variegated blue), and I gave the red a soft edge that extends slightly outside of the area of the heart.

The addition of the red solidified the heart by softening the blue background peeking through the ribbons, thus giving the heart a purple tint, adding bulk to it, reducing the background blues in that area, and also tying the background into the body of the heart.

The soft edges melt into the background, or else the crisp ribbon edges would have given the heart a ‘pasted on’ look. The heart has the appearance of lost and found edges, which blend objects into the background while keeping them separate and in the foreground, and they add interest. The large ribbon shapes on the right as opposed to the thin airy ribbons on the left, combined with the added soft red edges, give the effect of lost edges on the left and bottom, and found edges on the upper right.

The end result is an appealing piece of art, where the main object and the background all work together, the colors are harmonious, and the piece has a lot of visual interest.