Elements of Art

Just like a chocolate chip cookie recipe calls for a certain amounts of ingredients (like sugar, flour, baking soda, eggs, vanilla, and chocolate chips), art has things that make it "art," too.  If you're a Master Chef/Baker, you use more complex ingredients to make your signature dish (think truffles, shallots, prawns, Celtic sea salt, white pepper, and a mix of Romano/Parmesan cheeses).

Amateur artists use basic "ingredients," just like the home-baker uses the basic ingredients to make chocolate chip cookies.  Master Artists have their own "ingredients" to create their "signature dish," but the ingredients in art, however, are called elements.  The elements used in art are line, shape, form, space, texture, value and color.

There are always at least two Elements in every piece of art; even a piece that's a white board with a black line separating the piece into two halves.  That piece would be called a minimalistic art piece and it shows both line and space.  To be honest, you could even include texture in that, because there's the texture of the canvas and the texture of the medium used to make the line!  Even a dot in the middle of a canvas displays space, texture, & shape.  Honestly, I can't think of a piece of art that doesn't have at least three of those Elements.

Why are the Elements important?

It's really so you can get an idea that art is simple and easy and YOU can do it, too.  What's so hard about line, shape, form, space, texture, value, and color?  I have to say, individually, the elements aren't hard at all.

Even more than that, knowing what the elements of art are let's us:

1. share what we think of a piece of art using language that everyone has already agreed to.
2. gives you the tools to figure out what's going on in an artwork.
3. lets each of us describe what an artist has done, again using those tools everyone's already agreed to use.

I found a quick video from about.com that sort of quickly hops all over these, too.