When you design your do it yourself wedding flowers, you want a sense of rhythm in your bouquets or arrangements. When there is rhythm, you have movement created by regular repetition of some element or feature of your design. This movement stirs your emotions.
Rhythm is more often associated with music than with artistic expression. The movement from musical rhythm can be varied. It can be slow and leisurely, smooth and flowing, fast and cheerful, or choppy with abrupt breaks. Rhythm can be created in your wedding flowers through careful placement of flowers, foliage, and accessories. You want to create a design where your eyes rest on your focal point and then travel along a visual pathway that travels through your design and then leads you back to your focal point again. The movement of your eye is created by the rhythm of your design.
You can create rhythm 3 different ways – repetition, radiating lines, and transition.
Repetition
Repetition is probably the easiest way of creating rhythm. You can repeat colors, textures, shapes and lines. If you have bright, warm colors throughout your bouquet, your eye will naturally move away from your focal point to elements with the same color. Texture carefully placed in different places can create soft or subtle rhythm. repeating lines is the most noticeable way to create movement. Curved lines cause your eye to move. Repeated horizontal lines produce a slow, relaxed rhythm whereas vertical and diagonal lines cause your eyes to move rapidly from your focal point to the outer edges and then back again.
Radiating Lines
Lines radiating from your focal point naturally cause your eye to move from your focal point to the perimeter of your bouquet and then back again. You need to be careful to keep the stems from crossing each other so you don’t interrupt the movement, ruining the rhythm of your design.
Transition
Transition is when you change from one form to another. You can change from one texture to another or from one color to another. You do this by having an intermediate color between the 2 points of interest to help your eye naturally move from one color to another. For example, if you have an area of red and an area of yellow, you can create a transition by placing orange between them to create the visual pathway.
If you can create rhythm in your do it yourself wedding flowers, you will have a bouquet that captivates attention and produces pleasure.