EoA: Shape

Shape is what you use when you're making the outlines of your artwork on your canvas.  Typically, it's thought of as a two dimensional aspect of art, but applied to marble or clay, it could also take on some aspects of form.

To really get your hands dirty with shape, it's best to just grab a pencil and start drawing the basic shapes you learned in kindergarten.  Circle, triangle, square.  Those shapes are kind of like the primary colors: Red, yellow, blue.  With those colors, you can make every other color.  Using just those three shapes, you can make just about every other shape, simply by varying the size, angles, "squish," and "stretch" of the shape.

Squish and stretch aren't historic art terms that you'll find in an art class, by the way.  They're mine.  :)  I think of squishing as pinching it top to bottom and stretching as pulling the shape top to bottom; or left to right, if that's the orientation you prefer!

But if you squish a circle, you get a short fat oval.  If you stretch it, you still get an oval but it's long and thin now.  Same thing goes for the other shapes.

Now comes the fun part!  Laying those shapes (squished, stretched, and made the right size) over the top of each other gives you the form of things you already know.  For instance, if you took a square and overlapped another one of the exact same size, but changed the angle a little, you'd get an octagon.  Color it red and it's a stop sign.

If you take a square and put a triangle on top of it, it looks like a house.

You manipulate the shape until it looks like the thing you're looking at!

Resources:

http://www.williamsclass.com/ElectiveClassArt/ArtElementNotes.htm