WEEK 1: ELEMENTS OF ART/DESIGN

Element of art means the things or items that constitute an art or artwork. They are the ingredients that make up an artwork.

The elements and principles of design are the building blocks used to create a work of art. The elements of design can be thought of as the things that make up a painting, drawing, design, etc. Good or bad – all paintings will contain most of if not all, the seven elements of design.

A work of art can be analyzed by considering a variety of aspects of it individually. These aspects are often called the elements of art. A commonly used list of the main elements includes form, line, color, space, and texture.

Line

Lines and curves are marks that span a distance between two points (or the path of a moving point). As an element of visual art, a line is the use of various marks, outlines, and implied lines in artwork and design. A line has a width, direction, and length.[1] A line’s width is sometimes called its “thickness”. Lines are sometimes called “strokes”, especially when referring to lines in digital artwork.

Form

The form of a work is its shape, including its volume or perceived volume. A three-dimensional artwork has depth as well as width and height. Three-dimensional form is the basis of sculpture. However, two-dimensional artwork can achieve the illusion of form with the use of perspective and/or shading or modelling techniques. Formalism is the analysis of works by their form or shapes in art history or archeology.

Colour

Colour is the element of art that is produced when light, striking an object, is reflected to the eye. There are three properties to colour. The first is hue, which simply means the name we give to a colour (red, yellow, blue, green, etc.). The second property is intensity, which refers to the vividness of the colour. A colour’s intensity is sometimes referred to as its “colourfulness”, its “saturation”, its “purity” or its “strength”.The third and final property of colour is its value, meaning how light or dark it is. The terms shade and tint refer to value changes in colours. In painting, shades are created by adding black to a colour, while tints are created by adding white to a colour.

Space

Space is an area that an artist provides for a particular purpose. Space includes the background, foreground, and middle ground, and refers to the distances or area(s) around, between, and within things. There are two kinds of space: negative space and positive space. Negative space is the area in between, around, through, or within an object. Positive spaces are the areas that are occupied by an object and/or form.

Texture

Texture, another element of art, is used to describe either the way a work feels when touched or the depiction of textures in works, as in a painter’s rendering of colour.