Elements of Art

1. Elements of Art

2. Take something ordinary:

3. And break it down into its parts: • This is the work of artist and photographer UrsusWehrli

4. That’s what we do with art, too: • We break down art into its basic parts, or components: • The elements of art are very much the same as the ingredients when you cook or bake. • They are the building blocks of almost every single art work. They are the parts that add up to the whole.

5. Sometimes we need to work with what we already know. • Sometimes we make comparisons and find similarities between what we already know and what we need to learn. • You can then take information you already know and apply it to the learning of new ideas.

6. Construction • It says elements are the “building blocks” of art. • In construction you need to start with the basic materials like wood and bricks, concrete blocks and cement. These are considered as the components needed to make a building. They are the basic “elements” of building. • In art the “elements of art” are considered the basic components needed to create a piece of art. The building blocks in construction or lego are like the “elements” of building; just as shape, line, texture, space, value, form and colour are the “elements” of art.

7. The elements of art are the ingredients to make art • In the same way a chef uses eggs and flour, the artist uses colour and line, shape and form, and value. • The artist also uses space and texture. These are the ingredients to make artworks.

8. 7 elements: • There are seven elements of art: • Shape • Line • Texture • Space • Value • Form • Colour Almost every piece of art has one or more of these elementsused in the creation of that work of art.

9. She loves to share very fine chocolate: • To help you remember the elements you can think of the mnemonic: She loves to share very fine chocolate.1 • Shape, line, texture, space, value, form and colour. Thanks to Ryley Whiteford for this! She created this in her Grade 9 year.

10. It’s all in how you use them • The key thing to making art is the intentof the artist. What does the artist want to say or communicate or show? • Many artists use the elements such as colour or line or shape, but all make very different pieces of art with those same elements. Madame Matisse Henri Matisse Edvard Munch The Scream Leonardo da Vinci Mona Lisa Vincent Van Gogh: Starry Night

11. Tools are not the “elements” • The tools (brushes, paints, pencils) we use are not the elements. • They are similar to when a chef uses a bowl and spatula to mix the ingredients. The chef uses tools to mix the ingredients and ovens to cook them in. • The artist uses brushes, paints, and pencils to add line and shape and value and colour to make art.

12. UrsusWehrli • The painting on the right “Gold is Blue” is done by Joan Miro. • On the left is Wehrli’s work: He “tidies up” Joan Miro’s art. He’s broken it down into line, shape and colour.

13. UrsusWehrli • Below that you can see what he does with Picasso’s “The Red Armchair”. • He breaks it down into colour, line and shape.

14. She loves to share very fine chocolate Shape Sheis created with many beautiful shapes. Portrait of a Woman, 1942 by Pablo Picasso.

15. Shape • Shape is an element of art that “refers to an area clearly set off by one or more of the other visual elements such as colour, value, line, texture, and space.” • Shapes are flat. • Shape has no depth. • We think of circles and squares and objects drawn with outlines as having a “shape”. Shapes do not look 3-D

16. Artists working with shape • Joan Miro, 1940 “Nocturne” • Jacob Lawrence “Tombstones” 1942 Henri Matisse “Fall of Icarus” Paper cut outs, 1943

17. She Loves to share very fine chocolate. Lineis “a continuous mark made on some surface by a moving point” In art they are not just straight.

18. Line • There are 3 basic types of line: • Continuous lines • Broken lines and • Implied or imaginary lines

19. Line • Line can be thick or thin, rough or smooth, jagged or curved or straight. It can be even or uneven. The different types of line add interest to your art.

20. Picasso’s work • There are a few pieces where artist have created ephemeral pieces (ones that disappear or only exist for a moment of time where it is difficult to actually see these elements) • Here we see a 1949 drawing taken by a Life Magazine photographer of Picasso’s drawing. This drawing uses line.

21. Picasso’s more well known pieces Guernica Three musicians The Old Guitarist

22. She loves to share very fine chocolate Texture:how something feels or looks as if it might feel. • Too hairy? • Too prickly? • Too fuzzy?

23. Texture: • Texture is “ the element of art that refers to the way things feel or look like they might feel if touched”. • These pine needles look prickly and a little sharp.

24. Albrecht Durer • Albrecht Durer was a painter in the early 1500s who used dark and light values and line to create texture. • This helped to make things look almost photographic before there were cameras.

25. Drawing something with texture • To draw texture you have to pay close attention to the dark and light values that help to create that texture. • Shading in the space behind the object sometimes helps to create the illusion of the texture.

26. Using texture in art Artists need to use the elements of art to create the illusion of texture on a flat surface. Line, value and colour and space are used to simulate the actual textures. Artists use shading and shadows to make the objects appear “real”.

27. Mary Pratt • Mary Pratt is a Canadian artist who paints using a style called Photorealism. • This is her painting called “Salmon on Saran” and her woodcut “Reflection of Oranges”

28. She loves to share very fine chocolate Space: “can be thought of as the distance or area between, around, above, below or within things”

29. Space • It can be two-dimensional (the illusion of real space in art). Most drawing and painting is two-dimensional. • or it can be three-dimensional (actual space) like a sculpture.

30. What do you see? • Artists often talk about the figure (the object) and the ground ( the background) • Some times it’s difficult to know which is which. • What do you see here?

31. Positive and negative space • When we think of most art, the object we draw is usually considered the “positive” space. • The background is then called the “negative” space. • Sometimes the artist focusses on the background more than the foreground

32. So how do we get it to look further away? • We can use linearperspective which was highly developed during the Renaissance period. As things get farther back they get smaller. Artists use vanishing points to figure out how small they need to be.

33. Atmospheric or aerial perspective • We can also use tools such as the following which we can remember by the mnemonic – “DOCCS”: D: detail O: Overlapping C: Colour C: Clarity S: Size

34. The images can be quite simple • You can still create a sense of depth with silhouettes by varying the size, overlapping and using just 3 values

35. Making things look closer or further away: use “DOCCS” • This picture uses these tools to create a sense of depth. • The birds in the back are smaller that the birds in the foreground. • The birds overlap the farmland. It makes them look closer to us. • The colours of the fields in the far background, off in the distance, are lighter and greyer than the colours in the foreground of the painting. • The details are not as clear on the ground as they are on the birds. Things are blurred farther back.

36. So how does this work in a piece of art? • These tools can allow the artist to create the illusion of space and depth. • The trees overlap the houses; the things in the distance are lighter and greyer and smaller. • This painting is by Aldro Hibbard, an American painter (1886 –1972)

37. Vermeer – The Astronomer 1688 • The artist Vermeer used linear perspective in this painting to make the back of the room look further away than the things in the foreground. • If you look at the window and at the chair, the lines of those are not parallel. They go back to a vanishing point just above the globe. • The globe is lit and the perspective lines draw the viewer’s eye to the object where he wants the viewer to see.

38. She loves to share very fine chocolate Value“describes the lightness or darkness of a colour.” • Value helps to create an illusion of things being 3-dimensional and to help them look more realistic. • The contrasts in value add drama and depth.

39. Value • Often value is found to be an important element in works of art even though colour is absent:

40. Using Value: • A famous artist Chuck Close was injured in an accident and has limited mobility. • This was one of his portraits before his spinal injury in 1968. • It shows strong contrasts in value.

41. Chuck Close • After his spinal injury he changed his technique to making small squares of lights and darks to make his portraits.

42. More of Chuck Close’s work • This shows Chuck Close working on his self-portrait.

43. She loves to share very fine chocolate Form (3-D) is defined as “an object with three dimensions”. • This is a big challenge for an artist and requires careful observation of shadows and highlights and attention to detail.

44. Form • Many artists try to create an illusion of form on a flat surface, by the use of linear perspective, that is, line work that uses vanishing points. • They also use shading and shadowing to help to create a 3-D effect.

45. Forms (3-D) • A sphere (form) can be drawn by shading a circle (shape). • A cube is drawn by using squares • A cylinder is a circle or oval and a rectangle • A pyramid is a square and triangle • A cone is a circle and triangle

46. Form in sculpture • Form is most easily understood if we look at actual 3-D work such as sculpture. • Here is Henry Moore’s “Reclining Figure”.

47. Form in painting and Drawing • Artists need to create the illusion of 3-D: Julian Beever, a sidewalk chalk artist knows how to do this very effectively:

48. MC Escher • MC Escher was an artist in the early part of the 1900s who used line and value to create these illusions. • Line creates shape while value creates the form.

49. She loves to share very fine chocolate Colouris “an element of art that is made up of three distinct qualities: hue, intensity, and value” Portrait by street artist Quel Beast

50. Colour • Louis Prang developed a way to describe colours and their relationship to one another by placing the colours in a circle: “a colour wheel.”