FORMAL ELEMENTS IN ART & DESIGN

Formal Elements are a set of elements that when used together or in various combinations create a specific form of artwork. These consist in the list below:

Piet Mondrian – Line over Form

LINE

Lines can be vertical, horizontal, diagonal or curved these consist in in the forms of various objects in a painting for example, they are the basic drawing produced to show the shape of any object.

SHAPE

These can be either natural and man made shapes like for example squares, hexagons, polygons or other combined variations and they cab also be in the form of organic shape which tend to be more natural rather than man made geometrical shapes.

FORM

Three-dimensional shapes are forms, objects like sculptures, pottery, furniture work and animations fall under the category of form rather than that of shape since they are three-dimensional.

TONE

Every color has a series of lightness and darkness by the way light hits the object, this is referred to as Tone. This is just whenever a specific painting or image is requested to be in a particular mood, increasing or decreasing it adjusts the tone accordingly.

TEXTURE

The surface on an object can have various different kinds of texture; some of them can be sensed just by looking at them, while others must be felt by touch. There are two different categories for texture, these are actual texture which dose real exist and it can be felt, and than there is the visual texture which is created by the artist to give the impression of the desired texture.

PATTERN

A series of lines, shapes of even color which is represented in the same manner is refereed to as a pattern, these are both man made and are also found in nature.

COLOR

The primary colors which are red, yellow and blue cannot be achieved by mixing any of the other colors therefore their name as primary colors, while the secondary colors are all those different variations which are obtain by the mixing of the primary colors.

The Colour Wheel

Hardley Art, 2012. The Formal Elements in Art. [online] Available at: 

< http://hardleyart.wordpress.com/the-formal-elements-in-art/ > [Accessed 22 October 2013].

Buzzle, Intelligent Life on the Web, 2013. Understanding the Formal Elements of Art. [online] Available at: < http://www.buzzle.com/articles/formal-elements-of-art.html > [Accessed 22 October 2013].