Trap One: Distorting Until There's Nothing Left to Recognise
A distortion only means something while we can still tell what the object used to be. The power lives in the gap between "I know that's a teapot" and "but look what's happened to it" — your eye holds both at once, and that tension is the whole effect. Push too far and that gap snaps shut: the teapot becomes an anonymous blob, and a blob can't be surprising because there's no expectation left to break. In the toy, drag the warp slider up slowly. For a good while the meter sits in the green — bold, expressive, still clearly a teapot. Cross the tipping point marked in mustard and it flips into the red: unreadable mush.
Trap Two: Thinking More Distortion Is Always More Powerful
It's tempting to believe that if a bit of stretch is striking, a lot must be stunning. Not so. The strongest exaggerations usually sit just before the tipping point — far enough to be unmistakably deliberate, but not so far that the thing falls apart. Watch the verdict in the toy: there's a band labelled "transformed — powerful" that's the real sweet spot, and an "on the edge" warning right before collapse. Living in that band, rather than blasting straight past it, is what separates a confident artwork from a mess.
The Quiet One: Losing the Anchor
An object can also become unreadable not because it changed too much, but because you've removed everything that told us its size or kind — no familiar setting, no figure for scale, no recognisable detail. Keep at least one honest anchor in the picture: a doorway, a hand, a label, a person. That single believable thing is what makes the distortion next to it land. Strip every anchor away and even a gently warped object can read as abstract noise.