1. Line There are many different types of lines, all characterized by their length being greater than their width. Lines can be static or dynamic depending on how the artist chooses to use them. They help determine the motion, direction and energy in a work of art. We see line all around us in our daily lives; telephone wires, tree branches, jet contrails and winding roads are just a few examples. Look at the photograph below to see how line is part of natural and
constructed environments. The Nazca lines in the arid coastal plains of Peru date to nearly 500 BCE were scratched into the rocky soil, depicting animals on an incredible scale, so large that they are best viewed from the air. Let’s look at how the different kinds of line are made. Diego Velazquez’s Las Meninas from 1656, ostensibly a portrait of the Infanta Margarita, the daughter of King Philip IV and Queen Mariana of Spain, offers a sumptuous amount of artistic genius; its sheer size (almost ten feet square), painterly style of naturalism, lighting effects, and the enigmatic figures placed throughout the canvas–including the artist himself –is one of the great paintings in western art history. Let’s examine it (below) to uncover how Velazquez uses basic elements and principles of art to achieve such a masterpiece. Show
Diego Velazquez, Las Meninas, 1656, oil on canvas, 125.2” x 108.7”. Prado, Madrid. CC BY-SA Actual lines are those that are physically present. The edge of the wooden stretcher bar at the left of Las Meninas is an actual line, as are the picture frames in the background and the linear decorative elements
on some of the figures' dresses. How many other actual lines can you find in the painting? Laocoon Group, Roman copy of Greek original, Vatican Museum, Rome. Photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen. CC BY-SA Straight or classic lines provide structure to a composition. They can be oriented to the horizontal, vertical, or diagonal axis of a surface. Straight lines are by nature visually stable, while still giving direction to a composition. In Las Meninas, you can see them in the canvas supports on the left, the wall supports and doorways on the right, and in the background in matrices on the wall spaces between the framed pictures. Moreover, the small horizontal lines created in the stair edges in the background help anchor the entire visual design of the painting. Vertical and horizontal straight lines provide the most stable compositions. Diagonal straight lines are usually more visually dynamic, unstable, and tension-filled. Straight lines, 11 July 2012, Creator: Oliver Harrison. CC BY Expressive lines are curved, adding an organic, more dynamic character to a work of art. Expressive lines are often rounded and follow undetermined paths. In Las Meninas you can see them in the aprons on the girls’ dresses and in the dog’s folded hind leg and coat pattern. Look again at the Laocoon to see expressive lines in the figures’ flailing limbs and the sinuous form of the snakes. Indeed, the sculpture seems to be made up of nothing but expressive lines, shapes and forms. Organic lines, 11 July 2012, Creator: Oliver Harrison. CC BY There are other kinds of line that encompass the characteristics of those above yet, taken together, help create additional artistic elements and richer, more varied compositions. Refer to the images and examples below to become familiar with these types of
line. Outline, 11 July 2012, Creator: Oliver Harrison. CC BY Hatch lines are repeated at short intervals in generally one direction. They give shading and visual texture to the surface of an object. Hatch, 11 July 2012, Creator: Oliver Harrison. CC BY Crosshatch lines provide additional tone and texture. They can be oriented in any direction. Multiple layers of crosshatch lines can give rich and varied shading to objects by manipulating the pressure of the drawing tool to create a large range of values. Crosshatch, 11 July 2012, Creator: Oliver Harrison. CC BY Line quality is that sense of character embedded in the way a line presents itself. Certain lines have qualities that distinguish them from others. Hard-edged, jagged lines have a staccato visual movement while organic, flowing lines create a more comfortable feeling. Meandering lines can be either geometric or expressive, and you can see in the examples how their indeterminate paths animate a surface to different degrees. Lines, 11 July 2012, Creator: Oliver Harrison. CC BY Although line as a visual element generally plays a supporting
role in visual art, there are wonderful examples in which line carries a strong cultural significance as the primary subject matter. 2. ShapeA shape is defined as an enclosed area in two dimensions. By definition shapes are always flat, but the combination of shapes, color, and other means can make shapes appear three-dimensional, as forms. Shapes can be created in many ways, the simplest by enclosing an area with an outline. They can also be made by surrounding an area with other shapes or the placement of different textures next to each other—for instance, the shape of an island surrounded by water. Because they are more complex than lines, shapes are usually more important in the arrangement of compositions. The examples below give us an idea of how shapes are made. Geometric Shapes, 11 July 2012, Creator: Oliver Harrison. CC BY Referring back to Velazquez’s Las Meninas, it is fundamentally an arrangement of shapes; organic and hard-edged, light, dark and mid-toned, that solidifies the composition within the larger shape of the canvas. Looking at it this way, we can view any work of art, whether two or three-dimensional, realistic, abstract or non-objective, in terms of shapes alone. Geometric Shapes vs. Organic ShapesShapes can be further categorized into geometric and organic. Examples of geometric shapes are the ones we can recognize and name: squares, triangles, circles, hexagons, etc. Organic shapes are those that are based on organic or living things or are more free form: the shape of a tree, face, monkey, cloud, etc. 3. FormForm is sometimes used to describe a shape that has an implied third dimension. In other words, an artist may try to make parts of a flat image appear three-dimensional. Notice in the drawing below how the artist makes the different shapes appear three-dimensional through the use of shading. It's a flat image but appears three-dimensional. This image is free of copyright restrictions.When an image is incredibly realistic in terms of its forms (as well as color, space, etc.) such as this painting by Edwaert Collier, we call that trompe l'oeil, French for "fool the eye." Edweart Collier, Trompe l'oeil with Writing Materials,oil on canvas, c. 1702. This image is in the public domain. 4. Space Space is the empty area surrounding or between real or implied objects. Humans categorize space: there is outer space, that limitless void we enter beyond our sky; inner space, which resides in people’s minds and imaginations, and personal space, the important but intangible area that surrounds each individual and which is violated if someone else gets too close. Pictorial space is flat, and the digital realm resides in cyberspace. Art responds to all of
these kinds of space. One-Point Linear Perspective, 11 July 2012, Creator: Oliver Harrison. CC BY One-point perspective occurs when the receding lines appear to converge at a single point on the horizon and used when the flat front of an object is facing the viewer. Note: Perspective can be used to show the relative size and recession into
space of any object, but is most effective with hard-edged three-dimensional objects such as buildings. Two-point perspective occurs when the vertical edge of a cube is facing the viewer, exposing two sides that recede into the distance, one to each vanishing point. Two-Point Perspective, 11 July 2012, Creator: Oliver Harrison. CC BY View Gustave
Caillebotte’s Paris Street, Rainy Weather from 1877 to see how two-point perspective is used to give an accurate view to an urban scene. The artist’s composition, however, is more complex than just his use of perspective. The figures are deliberately placed to direct the viewer’s eye from the front right of the picture to the building’s
front edge on the left, which, like a ship’s bow, acts as a cleaver to plunge both sides toward the horizon. In the midst of this visual recession a lamp post stands firmly in the middle to arrest our gaze from going right out the back of the painting. Caillebotte includes the little metal arm at the top right of the post to direct us again along a horizontal path, now keeping us from traveling off the top of the canvas. As relatively spare as the left side of the work is, the artist crams the
right side with hard-edged and organic shapes and forms in a complex play of positive and negative space. Third Court of the Topkapi Palace, from the Hunername, 1548. Ottoman miniature painting, Topkapi Museum, Istanbul. CC BY-SA After nearly five hundred years using linear perspective, western ideas about how space is depicted accurately in two dimensions went through a revolution at the beginning of the 20th century. A young Spanish artist, Pablo Picasso, moved to Paris, then western culture’s capital of art, and largely reinvented pictorial space with the invention of Cubism, ushered in dramatically by his painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1907. He was influenced in part by the chiseled forms, angular surfaces and disproportion of African sculpture (refer back to the Male Figure from Cameroon) and mask-like faces of early Iberian artworks. For more information about this important painting, listen to the following question and answer. In the early 20th century, Picasso, his friend Georges Braque and a handful of other artists struggled to develop a new space that relied on, ironically, the flatness of the picture
plane to carry and animate traditional subject matter including figures, still life and landscape. Cubist pictures, and eventually sculptures, became amalgams of different points of view, light sources and planar constructs. It was as if they were presenting their subject matter in many ways at once, all the while shifting foreground, middle ground and background so the viewer is not sure where one starts and the other ends. In an interview, the artist explained cubism this way: “The
problem is now to pass, to go around the object, and give a plastic expression to the result. All of this is my struggle to break with the two-dimensional aspect*”(from Alexander Liberman, An Artist in His Studio, 1960, page 113). Public and critical reaction to cubism was understandably negative, but the artists’ experiments with spatial relationships reverberated with others and became – along with new ways of using color – a driving force in the development of a modern art movement
that based itself on the flatness of the picture plane. Instead of a window to look into, the flat surface becomes a ground on which to construct formal arrangements of shapes, colors and compositions. For another perspective on this idea, refer back to module one’s discussion of ‘abstraction’. George Braque, Castle at La Roche Guyon, 1909. Oil on canvas. Stedelijk van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, Netherlands. Licensed through GNU and Creative Commons As the cubist style developed, its forms became even flatter. Juan Gris’s The Sunblind from 1914 splays the still life it represents across the canvas. Collage elements like newspaper reinforce pictorial flatness. Juan Gris, The Sunblind, 1914. Gouache, collage, chalk, and charcoal on canvas. Tate Gallery, London. Image licensed under GNU Free Documentation License It’s not so difficult to understand the importance of this new idea of space when placed in the context of comparable advances in science surrounding the turn of the nineteenth century. The Wright Brothers took to the air with powered flight in 1903, the same year Marie Curie won the first of two Nobel prizes for her pioneering work in radiation. Sigmund Freud’s new ideas on the inner spaces of the mind and its effect on
behavior were published in 1902, and Albert Einstein’s calculations on relativity, the idea that space and time are intertwined, first appeared in 1905. Each of these discoveries added to human understanding and realligned the way we look at ourselves and our world. Indeed, Picasso, speaking of his struggle to define cubism, said “Even Einstein did not know it either! The condition of discovery is outside ourselves; but the terrifying thing is that despite all this, we can only find what we
know” (from Picasso on Art, A Selection of Views by Dore Ashton, (Souchere, 1960, page 15). 5. Value and ContrastValue (or tone) is the relative lightness or darkness of a shape in relation to another. The value scale, bounded on one end by pure white and on the other by black, and in between a series of progressively darker shades of grey, gives an artist the tools to make these transformations. The value scale below shows the standard variations in tones. Values near the lighter end of the spectrum are termed high-keyed, those on the darker end are low-keyed. Value Scale, 11 July 2012, Creator: Oliver Harrison, CC BY In two dimensions, the use of value gives a shape the illusion of form or mass and lends an entire composition a sense of light and shadow. The two examples below show the effect value has on changing a shape to a form.
This same technique brings to life what begins as a simple line drawing of a young man’s head in Michelangelo’s Head of a Youth and a Right Hand from 1508. Shading is created with line (refer to our discussion of line earlier in this module) or tones created with a pencil. Artists vary the tones by the
amount of resistance they use between the pencil and the paper they’re drawing on. A drawing pencil’s leads vary in hardness, each one giving a different tone than another. Washes of ink or color create values determined by the amount of water the medium is dissolved into. Caravaggio, Guiditta Decapitates Oloferne, 1598, oil on canvas. National Gallery of Italian Art, Rome. This work is in the public domain 6. Color Color is the most complex artistic element because of the combinations and variations inherent in its
use. Humans respond to color combinations differently, and artists study and use color in part to give desired direction to their work. Traditional ModelTraditional color theory is a qualitative attempt to organize colors and their relationships. It is based on Newton's color wheel, and continues to be the most common system used by artists. Blue Yellow Red Color Wheel. Released under the GNU Free Documentation License Traditional color theory uses the same principles as subtractive color mixing (see below) but prefers different primary colors.
Color MixingThink about color as the result of light reflecting off a surface. Understood in this way, color can be represented as a ratio of amounts of primary color mixed together. Color is produced when parts of the external light source's spectrum are absorbed by the material and not reflected back to the viewer's eye. For example, a painter brushes blue paint onto a canvas. The chemical composition of the paint allows all of the colors in the spectrum to be absorbed except blue, which is reflected from the paint’s surface. Common applications of subtractive color theory are used in the visual arts, color printing and processing photographic positives and negatives.
Subtractive Color Mixing. Released under the GNU Free Documentation License Color AttributesThere are many attributes to color. Each one has an effect on how we perceive it.
Color InteractionsBeyond creating a mixing hierarchy, color theory also provides tools for understanding how colors work together. MonochromeThe simplest color interaction is monochrome. This is the use of variations of a single hue. The advantage of using a monochromatic color scheme is that you get a high level of unity throughout the artwork because all the tones relate to one another. See this in Mark Tansey’s Derrida Queries de Man from 1990. Analogous ColorAnalogous colors are similar to one another. As their name implies, analogous colors can be found next to one another on any 12-part color wheel: Analogous Color, 11 July 2012, Creator: Oliver Harrison. CC BY You can see the effect of analogous colors in Paul Cezanne’s oil painting Auvers Panoromic View Color TemperatureColors are perceived to have temperatures associated with them. The color wheel is divided into warm and cool colors. Warm colors range from yellow to red, while cool colors range from yellow-green to violet. You can achieve complex results using just a few colors when you pair them in warm and cool sets. Warm cool color, 11 July 2012, Creator: Oliver Harrison. CC BY Complementary ColorsComplementary colors are found directly opposite one another on a color wheel. Here are some examples:
Complementary Color, 11 July 2012, Creator: Oliver Harrison. CC BY Blue and orange are complements. When placed near each other, complements create a visual tension. This color scheme is desirable when a dramatic effect is needed using only two colors. 7. Texture At the most basic level, Three-dimensional works of art
(sculpture, pottery, textiles, metalwork, etc.) and architecture have actual texture which is often determined by the material that was used to create it: wood, stone, bronze, clay, etc. Two-dimensional works of art like paintings, drawings, and prints may try to show implied texture through the use of lines, colors, or other ways. When a painting has a lot of actual texture from the application of thick paint, we call that
impasto. Licenses and AttributionsWhat is the element of art that is a continuous mark made with a pointed tool or pen or pencil?Line refers to a continuous mark made on a surface by a moving point. It can define shape, space, create pattern, imply movement or texture and allude to mass or volume. 2.
What element of art is a continuous mark that is made on a surface that has length and direction?Line. A line is a continuous mark made on a surface by a moving point. Lines can define a space, create an outline or pattern, imply movement or texture, mass or volume.
What element may be a continuous mark made on a surface with a pointed tool or?Line: An element of art that is used to define shape, contours, and outlines, also to suggest mass and volume. It may be a continuous mark made on a surface with a pointed tool or implied by the edges of shapes and forms.
What is an element of art that is a mark made by a moving pointed tool such as a brush pen or stick a moving point?line: A line is a mark made by a pointed tool; brush, pen, stick, pencil, etc. It is the identifiable path of a moving dot. Lines can be expressive because of their variety.
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