The Formal Elements are the parts used to make a piece of artwork. The artArt refers to a diverse range of human intellectual and expressive activities and the outcomes of those activities. Within this context art is further defined as visual art and includes painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, photography and work made using digital media. elements are lineLines are used by artists and designers to describe objects, add detail or create expression. Lines define an artwork and reveal the artist’s techniques. Line is one of the visual elements. It is the path of a moving point, such as a pen, pencil or brush. In your work, it is important to vary the quality of lines, making them bold and heavy or light and delicate to suggest different things. Line can be used to give the impression of different textures and tones as well as simply showing where the edge of an object meets space - remember that objects do not have outlines in real life., shapeShapes are two-dimensional. Positive shapes represent solid objects and negative shapes show the surrounding space. Geometric shapes are perfect and regular. Organic shapes are irregular and natural., space, formForm refers to three dimensional objects. While shapes have two dimensions (height and width), forms have three dimensions (height, width and depth). The overall unity of the visual elements in an art work; it is usually contrasted with content. Form is sometimes used to refer to the three dimensional aspect of an art work, as opposed to shape, which is seen as referring to two dimensional aspects., toneThe relative lightness or darkness of a colour. E.g. Light, dark, tint, shade, black, white, grey, shadow, highlight, contrast, monotone, high key, low key. Tone is normally seen as one aspect of colour, concerned with its lightness or darkness; in painting, if different amounts black and white are added to a hue, the results are different tones., textureArtists and designers can use actual texture in their work or they can suggest how something feels using techniques that imply texture. There are two types of texture: actual texture and visual texture. E.g. Rough, smooth, hard, soft, matt, shiny, waxy, coarse, glossy, scratchy, silky, wet, dry, feathery. Texture is the surface quality of an object. In art, it can refer to an illusion of texture, for example in a painting that shows the smoothness of a child’s face and the rough surface of a tree. It can also refer to actual texture, as in a collage. In your own work, you can achieve different textures by adding different materials to your paint, or by incorporating things such as fragments of hard clay, sawdust or sand into the medium you are using., patternA design in which lines, shapes, forms or colours are repeated. E.g. Regular, irregular, repeat, tessellating, symmetrical, natural, geometric, rotation, grid, rhythm, decorative, border. Pattern has three main meanings: 1) a decorative design, usually of a repeated motif or figure; 2) the composition or layout of an artwork; 3) the model or mould used for casting. In the first kind of definition, visual forms, or motifs are repeated, often in a systematic manner, such as in the repeated geometric forms found in Islamic art., colourChoices of colour and the relationships between colours have a huge influence on how a piece or art or design looks and feels and the emotions it provokes. Colour is made up of different aspects. The most useful terms used to describe these aspects are probably: hue, tone, saturation, complementary, analogous, tint, shade, primary and secondary. and compositionThe combination of a selection of distinct elements to work towards creating a whole image or form. The arrangement of shapes, colours, textures, marks and lines in a painting. A composition is something that is put together - it is an arrangement of different elements. In art, the visual elements are combined by paying attention to things such as balance, harmony, rhythm and contrast to give a unified whole. Sometimes composition is used to refer to one piece of art work, such as a painting. They are often used together, and how they are organised in a piece of art determines what the finished piece will look like.
The principles of art are scaleThe relative size of an object or artwork in relation to its surroundings and to itself. Scale refers to the relative proportion of one thing to another. Something that is drawn on a scale of a tenth is ten times smaller than the original., proportion, unity, variety, rhythm, mass, shape, space, balance, volume, perspective, and depth.