2. A digital lesson about Futurism and visual movement in art  2005 Pearson Publishing

3. Once upon a time there was a group of artists called the Futurists. They started up as a formal group in 1909 in Italy. They had many interesting and strange ideas about the world and about art. The main Futurists were Filippo Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini.

4. One of the most important Futurist ideas was that art should celebrate the power and energy of machines, since, in 1909, this stood for the progress of the human race towards an amazing future. They came up with ways to solve the problem of showing this energy in paintings and sculptures, which of course generally don’t move at all. However, paintings and sculptures can show visual movement or visual energy. This is the focus for this lesson.

5. It’s easy to think like a Futurist – especially if you can ride a bike. Energy is passed into a machine – speed – energy – danger! So I got on my bike and pedalled as fast as I could, to experience exactly what this is like... This idea came from seeing Umberto Boccioni’s painting, ‘The Dynamism of a Cyclist’.

6. This is my starting point – the engine of my bike – where the energy of my body is changed into speed and movement.

7. My first step is to use the brightness and contrast options. I’ve increased the contrast and darkened the image to create a more dramatic effect.

8. Now I’ve used the magic wand selection tool to select a big section of white shapes. I’ve copied and pasted these shapes on top of the picture and moved them to the left and down a little.

9. I’ve pasted them a second time to start to create an impression of movement in the design.

10. To get away from the ‘bike in my garden’ colour scheme, I’ve used the invert option. This has reversed all the colours and turned light to dark.

11. This slide illustrates one of the most powerful commands in modern image manipulation software. This is the use of layers. Here is the tool panel which displays the two layers. I’ve copied the whole picture and pasted it as a new layer on top of the image as it was just before I inverted it. I’ve moved the top layer to the right and down a little, using the move tool.

12. I’ve used the layer controls to set the top layer transparency to 50%. This allows the shapes to become much richer and more complex. It’s getting closer to the energetic effect of movement that I’m trying to create.

13. I’ve used the paint bucket tool to pour red paint into some of the key shapes. I’ve also flattened the layers into one image. This makes it easier to work with a single image again.

14. This change is made by using a paint effect filter. It has simplified the shapes but made the impact of the design much stronger!

15. To complete this stage, I’ve simply used the crop tool to cut off the edges.

16. I’ve decided to experiment a little more! This filter is called find edges.

17. I’ve put a find edges layer over the previous stage, and made it transparent once again. This is definitely a stage where something has to get worse before it gets better!

18. I’ve flattened the layers, inverted the colour and then cropped the image. This definitely does the job! Complex shapes, rich colours and textures, and a sense of movement in the design!

19. I still really like this stage though. Good job I saved it!

20. One of the great advantages of digital work is that you can experiment with many more possibilities, and much more quickly than you ever could with paints or other traditional materials. If you save work as you are changing it, you can easily created a whole variety of beautiful images from relatively simple starting points.

21. Let’s see that again without the captions. Just watch how the picture develops.

36. Thank you for following this lesson. Now it’s time for you to try out some of these ideas!