Using Golden Rectangle Proportions for Pastel Painting

Video Transcript

"The golden rectangle has been used by artists and architects for centuries. The Parthenon is built upon the golden rectangle. The golden rectangle comes from mathematics. It comes from the Fibonacci series of numbers. Fibonacci series of numbers is one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one, and so on. If you take the first number and add it to the second number, it gives you the third number, add those two together, it gives you the next number, add those two together, it gives you the next number. What you end up with is a ratio of one point six, approximately, to one. One point six, to one. We're actually going to cut this so that it's there. Five to three or eight to five, therein, lies the golden rectangle. The beauty of the golden rectangle, is that if you take the golden rectangle section, here is a golden rectangle section, and you draw a square, out of that golden rectangle section, what you end up with is a golden rectangle here, a square here and, surprisingly enough, another golden rectangle, right here. You can divide this space up into fives and eights and squares and you'll end up with a whole series of rectangles, that are golden rectangle sections, and squares. Squares and golden rectangles section and everywhere you go, you'll end up with a square and a golden rectangle. Those positions are all where the eye, naturally, will go, if it's allowed to, that's where it finds rest. It finds rest there, primarily, because of the fact that our selves divide that way. When a flower grows, it grows in a spiral. The shell spiral of a nodelist, is due to that growth rate, so it's somehow built into us, to like that ratio and when artists discovered it, when they started painting and when they started doing things like building buildings, they discovered that that was a very perfect shape and established good composition that people naturally liked. I tend to build any structure, whether it's a still life or whether it's a portrait, and use the golden rectangle as a guideline, as a place to start, rather than just breaking things down into simple halves. In fact, an eight and a half by eleven sheet of paper, is, basically, based upon the golden rectangle."