Art Terms Glossary & Concept Index

[holland]

This thread serves as a tool for navigating the content in this subforum alphabetically and locating all posts relevant to a particular topic. It includes quick summaries, but you should go through the links for more accurate and in-depth information.

[holland]

A

Applied Fundamentals
Core skills and theory needed to execute an art process in practice. Fundamentals that share names may be very different in practice depending on the approach an artist is using to apply them.

• What makes something an art fundamental?

Automaticity
The ability to use a concept accurately without conscious thought. This is the next step after mastery. When one concept branches off of another, it is easier to practice the child if the parent is automatic. So the more fundamental a concept is, the more important it is to reach an automatic level with it. But developing an automatic process without mastery over the concept leaves prerequisite gaps that prevent further progress, cause deep frustration, and are very difficult to spot and address.

B

Burnout
A state of long-term mental and physical exhaustion that prevents one from engaging in the activity that initially triggered it without bodily harm. Burnout is partly a disruption of normal hormone cycles resulting from chronic stress and can cause permanent damage to vital organs. It can also present as a kind of complex trauma in terms of its psychological impacts. Burnout is preventable for most people with regular breaks, healthy sleeping and eating patterns, short work days, and stress management. But some individuals will be more prone to it than others regardless of the precautions taken.

C

Composition
The arrangement of something. In visual art, it pertains to how elements are arranged on the canvas or at each moment of the viewer's sight. Composition is what makes a work of art look aesthetically pleasing even when other fundamentals are poorly executed.


Compositional Fundamentals
Core skills and theory related to executing a successful composition in art, such as the elements of art and the principles of design.

• What makes something an art fundamental?

Croquis
In English, croquis refers to bases used as underdrawings that clothes are drawn over, which have contour lines establishing the proportions in perspective. This is the definition I use.
In French, croquis is used how we use the word "sketch." They can be considered synonyms. Some art lineages that trace back to France still use it this way.
In Japanese, croquis refers to speed drawing activities, or what we often call "gesture drawings" in English. You will commonly hear it in translations of Japanese tutorials.


D

Disciplinary Fundamentals
Core skills and theory related to a particular discipline in art, such as illustration versus music or acting. This umbrella encompasses all possible approaches to that craft.

• What makes something an art fundamental?

Drawing
In visual art, this can refer to the act of using dry media to create art, the act of sketching or rendering art initially or primarily with lines instead of shapes, the planning and comprehension of an artwork's underlying structure, or the process of creating visual art in general. The word itself is very old and simply means to drag or pull something, so it has taken on many different definitions depending on the discipline, approach, and context.

E

Elements of Art
The building blocks a work of art can be made from in terms of its surface-level composition. In visual art, this includes things like shapes, values, lines, and colors. Each element has entire fields of theory behind it that one could spend a lifetime studying.


Existential Fundamentals
Core skills and theory that apply to the most fundamental of human experiences. Many art fundamentals are ultimately derived from these more base concepts, and understanding them can help the derived concepts click.

• What makes something an art fundamental?

F

Fundamentals
Core skills and theories that more advanced and niche concepts branch off of or rely on. All educational paths lead back to them, but it's easier on students if they start with the fundamentals as the initial foundation of their studies.

• What makes something an art fundamental?

G

H

Henshuusha
A manga editor. They are a bit different from western book editors. Henshuusha are more like advanced readers assigned to a series that give their input at various stages, except they also have veto power and the final say in whether a work can be published in its current state. Their pay is often directly linked to the series they edit for, so they have a strong incentive to push mangaka to complete their work on time and keep it in line with reader expectations. Many mangaka credit their henshuusha for their successes and consider  them coauthors. Each manga typically has one dedicated henshuusha. They are sometimes replaced partway through a series due to retirement or reorganization etc, which can result in tonal shifts and a distinct "before and after" feeling in a manga.

I

J

Jargon
Words used to refer to concepts specific to a particular discipline, industry, or field of expertise. They are often homonyms with common words, so it is not be obvious at first glance that an entirely different definition is being referred to, which causes confusion for beginners. By learning the language, you unlock the ability to understand more advanced resources, and you're given a framework for what concepts were important enough to be named and thus need to be studied. However, art's jargon is not as standardized as the jargon of other fields, so one word can have many different meanings depending on the speaker and context.

K

L

Lost Prerequisites
Skills, concepts, and practices that were once so commonplace they became taken for granted and then forgotten, causing other skills dependent on them to become unnecessarily difficult to learn. Many important practices in art have been thrown by the wayside because we forgot why things used to be done the way they were.

M

Manga
Originally the Japanese word for drawing freely from imagination, it later came to describe comic books of all kinds in Japanese. In the west, it was used to refer specifically to comics made in Japan, which had a very distinctive style: Thanks to Japan's culture of affordable magazines, monochrome printing styles flourished and continued advancing long after other countries moved to color as a standard. In recent years, Japanese people have distinguished between manga and western comics in speech, and "manga" is increasingly considered its own distinct style of comic even in Japan. Japanese publishers feel that manga that can be produced in any location and are actively scouting foreign mangaka to work in the style.

Mangaka
An individual who creates manga, especially the artist producing the illustrations. The artist is typically also the writer and director. However, a mangaka may be aided by assistants and editors (henshuusha).

Mastery
Complete comprehension of a concept, including its definition, logic, theories, formulas, and application. At this level, the actual use of the concept still requires conscious thought and high cognitive load. Rote memorization without comprehension does not qualify as mastery.

N

Notan
In English, notan refers to the shapes an image forms when its lights and darks are grouped and flattened to a purely black & white thumbnail. The notan is the first thing the brain processes about an image, so it is an important topic when learning composition.
In Japanese, notan is simply used how we use the word "value" and can be considered synonymous with it. There are no deep philosophies involved. However, orientalist folklore has developed around the term amongst English speakers that you will hear brought up from time-to-time.

O

P

Painting
This visual art, this can refer to creating art using wet media like paint, to rendering an image primarily with shapes rather than lines, or as a synonym for illustration or representation.


Prerequisite
A concept that needs to be understood, or a skill that needs to be achieved, before something else can be understood or practiced to the point of mastery. You can often spot prerequisites from a concept's definition: if there are unfamiliar words in it, you probably need to explore those first. When one class is a prerequisite to another, that means it teaches the nearest prerequisite concepts you will need to understand the other class.


Principles of Design
The types of relationships that can exist between the elements in a composition. It includes concepts like unity, harmony, contrast, repetition, rhythm, and so forth. These relationships have a significant impact on how the brain experiences a work of art in terms of its emotional impact. In visual art, they also interact with focal points to influence how the eye moves around the page and thus what viewers notice when.

Q

R

S

Scaffolding
Addressing concepts in a logical order that gradually ramps up in difficulty and is easy to digest. The ultimate goal is to build one idea on the previous without missing any prerequisites along the way. But no prerequisite tree is perfectly nested, which is why you can't master a fundamental by studying it start to finish in isolation. You need tools and exercises and mastery of adjacent topics to provide a structure for learning more complex ideas.


Symbol Drawing
See: Symbolic Approach


Symbolic Approach
An approach to art where objects are drawn as simple 2D symbols seen from their most recognizable side. This manner of drawing relates to how the brain remembers identifying information, and it comes naturally to most beginners and children.

• What are the approaches to art?

T

U

V

W

X

Y

Z

((This will get split into separate replies later for easier linking & navigation, but there's no reason to drag out the page when there are only a few posts at the moment.))