Elements of Art: Line, Shape, Space, Color, Value, and Texture
Artists use line to determine the edges of the images they’re depicting. Lines can have different qualities.
Shapes are two dimensional. Forms are three-dimensional-in appearance or in actuality (as in a sculpture).
Artists who paint or draw create the illusion of space on a flat surface.
Sculptors create work using physical space.
The three primary colors-red, yellow, and blue-are used to make all other colors. Artists use color to create mood.
Value is the lightness or darkness of a color.
Artists use value to shade images and add light and shadows.
Texture means surface quality. It can be the way a painting or sculpture actually feels or an illusion like this feather.
artists, like chefs, use a variety of ingredients to make art.
The way they’re combined influences the final piece, just as a chef’s mixture of ingredients makes a meal spicy
or sweet. Art’s ingredients, called the elements of art, are line, shape/form, space, color, value, and texture (see chart at left). Artists compose, or arrange, the elements in endless ways to create vastly different works of art.
Lines Give Art Shape
Have you seen the painting above right before? It is Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh’s 1889 The Starry Night, one of the most famous works in modern art. This painting a favorite of many people. But why?
It is easy to discuss what makes Van Gogh’s painting a masterpiece when we break it down to the elements of art.
Line is one of the most prominent elements in this painting. Notice how Van Gogh uses continuous spirals to paint the night sky. He contrasts this by using long, organic (curved) lines to paint the large cypress tree on the left and short, sharp dashes in the tiny village below.
The artist also uses line to develop shape and form. He uses short, choppy lines to circle the stars and call attention to their shape. He uses thick, dark outlines to build the geometric forms of the village houses and make them look three-dimensional.
Space Is More Than Stars
Can you tell how Van Gogh sets up the illusion of physical space on the picture plane (two-dimensional art surface)? Take a look at the cypress tree in the foreground.
Compare its size with the steeple of the church. Which is closer to the viewer? In the middle ground, the artist paints rolling hills on the horizon, which separate the sky from the land. The night sky in the background occupies nearly two thirds of the canvas.
Which part of the painting demands the most attention?
The Value of Color
Blue is the dominant hue, or color, in The Starry Night. How many different values (shades) of blue can you identify in it? The artist paints the stars, the moon, and a band of light on the horizon in yellow and white. These highlights (brighter colors) also reflect off the roofs in the town, giving the entire work a mysterious glow.
Layers of Texture
Van Gogh used a painting technique called impasto on this work. He spread paint thickly across the canvas. The thick paint makes the brushstrokes more visible. By changing the direction of his brushstrokes, the artist gives the painting a dense texture, or surface quality. The thick paint also gives the work an uneven surface that has its own natural highlights and shadows when light shines on it.
You can use the same elements of art
Vincent Van Gogh did to create your own masterpiece. Turn the page to learn more!
The Menin Road
The Menin Road is a painting by Paul Nash who was a soldier in World War I. It commemorates the Menin Battle, one of the most terrible battles on the Western Front. It represents an area devastated by the war, a kind of no man’s land. The most prominent feature of the canvas is the devastated apocalyptic landscape represented by the menacing sky full of clouds, the road surface invisible under the mud, the concrete blocks, the stagnant pools of muddy water, the shell craters and the dead mutilated plants. The trees are particularly striking, all dead and broken, their tops likely blown off by bombs. Two pairs of soldiers attempt to make their way across the desolate field. Perhaps the most chilling aspect of this painting is the two beams of light from unseen airplanes that shine through the clouds; they mirror the rays of divine light that shine through the clouds in so many religious paintings to represent God’s presence. They shine onto a scene completely devoid of grace or divinity.
Paul Nash (1889–1946) was born in London. In the spring of 1917 he was sent out to the front and, although he hated war and violence, he confessed himself happier in the fighting line than out of it. He did a series of paintings of trench life and no man’s land, thus becoming the most individual and expressive of the artists who recorded the battlefields of the First World War. His complete integrity of vision, his individualism and his remarkable ability to evoke the spirit of his subject, set him somewhat apart from his contemporaries. Early in the 1930s, Nash started to paint extraordinary visionary landscapes dealing with the changing of seasons, and a series of equally visionary sunflower paintings on which he was still working at the time of his death.