The Elements of Art

[holland]

(This applies to all artforms, but each one has different elements. I will be focusing on visual art here.)

The elements are the actual tools we have available to us when we create a work of art.

You might know lots of complex things about the subject you want to draw or paint, such as the anatomy of the body. But no matter how much you know about a bone, you can't put a bone on the 2D page. You can only apply elements like lines, shapes, colors, and values in the hopes of giving an impression of that bone.

Form (3D shapes) is sometimes included as an element, but this technically only counts as an element in 3D visual formats, like sculpting or theatre, or in conceptual formats, like design. Otherwise, we can only imply them through our lines and shapes, so they are not really their own element in a 2D image. More on this at the end.

The elements of art are one of the first things we learn in school as children, at least here in the US. It's usually not explained very well or isn't remembered clearly. As a result, it tends to be taken for granted by artists later on in their development.

But these elements are at the core of everything we do. They're the only interface we actually have as artists to create the image on our canvas. They're our controller.

Everything else is just theory to help us figure out where we want the elements placed and why, or to design some underlying subject we might want to draw later.

When we lose sight of that, art can become overwhelming. We start to forget that it's just lines and shapes in the end. It's important to remember that what exists in your conceptual world or reference photo is NOT what you're putting on the page.

It can also help our learning to categorize or associate the topics we're studying according to the related elements. There are many things to learn about value, versus color, form, etc.

And when it comes to composition, these elements apply even when we're not explicitly using them.

For example, a sculpture or work of architecture will always be seen in 2D by the viewer's eyes in each moment and simplified by their brains, so all of the 2D elements still apply to that experience. The eye sees shapes even though it's looking at forms.

There can be shapes that are not drawn, just as there are forms that are not sculpted. Your 2D arrangement of shapes can give us a sense of a 3D composition of forms that we judge as forms just as we would a space we've just walked into. Your floors are seen as floors and your walls as walls, even though they're just shapes.

In this way, you have the applied elements you're actually manipulating directly with your medium and implied elements experienced by the viewer as a result of those manipulations.

So in 2D art, form is usually an implied element, which is why I wouldn't normally categorize it as an element for drawing or painting purposes.