When looking at Japanese ukiyo-e one can often see that they draw perspective in a different way, but that doesn't make it bad or wrong, it's just two different ways to create depth on a two dimensional surface. I've read some other articles regarding visual arts and its relation to bonsai where foreshortening has been understood as being synonymous with actual shortening through bending. This is not the case. Foreshortening means to make something appear to have depth through optical illusion or as a visual effect and in that sense it's just another word for graphical perspective. It does not belong in the horticultural realm as a shortcut to tight foliage, it belongs in the realm of two dimensional representations of depth. Why is that distinction important? Because foreshortening can be used to make something appear shorter without actually making it shorter ! An easy way to destroy the sense of depth and flatten any 2 dimensional representation is to place two different elements close enough to touch but without any of them overlapping the other, which is called a tangent in visual arts (Figure 2).

As you can see it's virtually impossible to tell which of them is behind the other in the first picture. In this case overlapping is a useful tool to help the viewer understand what's in front. Perspective is perhaps first and foremost used when making forest plantings, and it can be quite useful if used properly. The sense of depth is usually accomplished through the placing of smaller trees in the back and on the sides. However, since the small pot makes the perspective exaggerated it's easy to make a tree that's supposed to seem far away appear small instead. In some cases that might be exactly what you're looking for but it might come in handy to know the basics of perspective if you think that the results weren't what you were looking for.

There are other ways to create depth too. Scale is one of them, and it's another crucial factor when it comes to creating convincing bonsai in my opinion. Short needles, small leaves and fine ramification adds to the illusion of standing next to a huge tree in nature. Cool colors have a tendency to appear as being far away while warm colors appear to be close. This can be explained by what's called aerial perspective. Imagine distant mountains, they always have a blue-ish color because of the atmosphere and hence we usually associate blue with distance. Another way to create depth is through the use of details. Again, distant things appear to have less detail or visualize a macro photography of some insect sitting on a flower with blurry background. These different ways might not be the most important when it comes to bonsai, with the exception of scale, but it's only to show that there actually are other ways. There's a ton of information about perspective on the Internet so there's really no need for me to duplicate the resources that's already available for everyone that's interested, but I do hope that some will find the tip about tangents interesting.

Negative space is not important because the birds need space to fly through, but that sure is a great way to make someone use them without explaining why they're important. Negative space doesn't mean an area that doesn't look good or any other negative connotation, on the contrary, negative space can be an extremely positive and useful tool to examine a composition. What it really means is areas and shapes behind the main object. The reason it's so important is because the negative space actually tells as much about the object as the object itself. They can also be used as any other element to balance a composition since the eye treats it like just another object or to create interesting repetitions and groupings by having a similar shape as a positive element like in the example above with the 2007 winning tree at Nöelanders Trophy. One can think about it as the beat in a song. Imagine a snare drum going one beat per second, the actual beat is the positive space and the silence between them is the negative space. The length of the silence between beats will tell if it's a slow ballad or if it's Rock n' Roll.

Another way to use it is when you have stared yourself blind at a tree and you simply know something looks bad but you cant tell why. Take a photo of it and import into an image software, trace the contour of the tree (remember to include encircled negative spaces) and make the whole tree white, then make everything else black. This should help you see the tree with new eyes and enable you to truly analyze if you have used the negative spaces to their full potential. The image below is an example of an imaginary semi cascade on a stand with a scroll in the background drawn from scratch solely by filling the negative spaces with black just to show how important the negative space really is and how much information it can hold (Figure 3).

The "secret" to negative space is to give it exactly the same amount of attention as one does the positive areas, since they are just as important ! It is sometimes said that the amount of negative space should roughly be the same as the amount of positive space, but I don't know how much water that statements hold since my experience is that if you make something 50/50 it usually seems too static.

And last but not least, I promised to discuss lines. Instead of speaking about lines from the perspective of paintings or drawing I thought I would show a way of using lines to analyze a tree with help from the illustration above. Lines can be interpreted in a number of ways, but in visual arts the usually represent where an object ends. They can have many functions such as to give a sense of depth, lead the eye through the composition, show the shape of an object etc. Since real life is perceived visually in three dimensions, lines don't really exist in nature in a sense but they can be a pretty useful tool when analyzing compositions (and of course to create them). The illustration I used above isn't made from lines but it certainly contains a lot of them and these hold quite a bit of information. When I first looked at it I thought that it looked like an average generic semi cascade, but when I tried to mark all horizontal and curved lines it became obvious to me that the tree was very "busy", like a drum roll that kept going faster and faster. It start pretty slow where the trunk starts and then it picks up speed, especially in the lower half because the distance between the foliage pads decreases ( Figure 4)

I also noticed that the crown was pointing to the left while the cascade was pointing to the right and the horizontal "bar branch" in blue which almost divides the whole composition in two. While I'm on the subject of bar branches, there's both a horticultural and aesthetic aspect to it. The horticultural aspect is that bar branches will create inverse taper and cause the trunk to swell where the branches meet. The aesthetic aspect is that they tend to divide the composition in two. This does not however exclude any other element in the composition. All elements have the ability to divide the composition in two, be it deadwood or foliage pads, so the Rule should read "do not divide the composition in two" AND "no bar branches because they cause reverse taper and ugly lumps". Also, the composition can be split both vertically and horizontally or any other way and they're equally bad. The split itself it caused by long lines (in this case it was the bottom of two foliage pads) that the eye perceive as continuous regardless if they are or not because the eye tends to follow a line until there is some kind of interruption, the same way it continues in a text even if there's a huge gap. Anyway, back to the tree...

I mentioned that the tree was very busy so I tried to fix that by grouping the different foliage pads together in a total of three major groups, one in the top, one in the middle and finally one in the bottom. The gap between these three groups gives the eye a place to rest, kind of like a period in a text. I also changed the inclination of the foliage pads since I thought that the all-horizontal approach was too static for the design. This also gives the tree a clearer direction to the right which I wanted to accentuate. Some of the foliage pads to the left was altered a bit since I thought they demanded too much attention (i.e. too much visual weight). Also, the apex was moved a bit to the right to make the general direction of the tree show less ambivalence. The tree was shortened a bit even though that problem got solved when I altered the foliage pads that split the composition in two. Better or worse? You be the judge! (Figure 5)