What Element of Art is used the most?

What if you had the keys to the artistic kingdom? With each of these essentials for making art, that is exactly what you have. Understanding and applying the building blocks of art (or the elements and principles of art, as they are often called) is what takes an artist from beginner to master.

In order to understand, deftly critique, and practice your chosen art form, you need to know the key concepts that it is built upon. Familiarity with elements of art (like color and line) and principles of art (proportion, rhythm, and contrast, among others) is what gives artists that fluency. You can build on these elements and principles with a glossary of art terms to describe art.

With your knowledge of these, you will always be able to find the joy and excitement that can surround art…and for art lovers, there is nothing more appealing than that.

Related: To start putting these elements and principles to work, download An Artist’s Guide to Composition.

6 Elements of Art

Think of the elements of art as the arrows in your quiver or tools in a toolbox. You use them individually and in combination for any art making endeavor. For the visual arts, these are visual elements: color, form, line, shape, space, texture, and value.

1: Color

A three-pronged element of art: hue, value, and intensity.

Hue is the color itself.

Value is the hue’s lightness or darkness and changes when white or black is added to it.

Intensity is the aspect of brightness and purity of a color. High intensity colors are bold and bright. Low intensity colors are faint and duller.

Related: How to Speak the Language of Color

Fall Plowing by Grant Wood

2: Form

For painters and draftsmen, form is the element of art that renders a three-dimensional  form in two dimensions. In a lot of ways it is the heart of an art object — the form itself. It can enclose a volume and includes height, width, and depth. A cube, a sphere, a cylinder and a pyramid are all different forms. Forms can also be formless — abstracted and free-flowing.

3: Line

Marks made on a surface are known as line. They start at a point and move along, creating space as they go. Lines can be two- or three-dimensional, describing form or the form itself, implied, or abstract. Creating a series of parallel lines to indicate form is a technique known as hatching. Crosshatching indicates more than one set of these lines laid overtop of each other at angles to model and indicate tone.

Related: Vincent van Gogh and His Lust for Line

4: Shape

The element of art that is two-dimensional, flat, or limited to height and width. Usually a shape is enclosed.

5: Space

Space is the element of art through which both positive and negative areas are defined or a sense of depth is achieved in a work of art.

6: Texture

Texture defines the way an art object or an element in a composition feels or looks as if it would feel if touched.

To take a deeper dive, check out 7 Tools for Texture in Watercolor.

Grand Odalisque by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

9 Principles of Art

If the elements of art are your tools, the principles of art are how you put them to work. It is where the style of art manipulates its substance. Rhythm, harmony, balance, contrast, movement, proportion, and variety are the principles of art.

1: Rhythm

This principle of art describes the movement in or of an artwork. Rhythm is created by the variety and repetition of elements in a work of art that come together to create a visual tempo or beat.

2: Harmony

This is achieved when the elements of an artwork come together in a unified way. Certain element are repeated yet still look and feel similar. Not monotony and not chaos, harmony is that perfectly honed combination of both.

3: Balance

Artists combine elements to add a feeling of equilibrium or stability to a work of art. Symmetry and asymmetry are manifestations of balance.

Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh

4: Contrast

Areas of contrast are where a viewer’s eye are usually first drawn. Artists will combine elements to stress the differences between those elements.

In the following video, artist Nancy Reyner shows how to critique and improve a painting by adding contrast and introducing opposites.

5: Movement

Movement is used to create the look and feeling of action in an artwork. It guides the viewer’s eye throughout a piece. A sense of movement can be varied lines, repetition of elements, and gestural mark-making among many more.

This is the uniform repetition of an element of art or combination of elements. Anything can be turned into a pattern through repetition.

Within the realm of the elements and principles of art, proportion is the relationship of elements in an artwork to the whole and to one another.

The principle of art concerned with diversity or contrast is that of variety. Variety is brought about by using different colors, sizes and shapes in a work of art. It is the partner of unity. Artists seek the balance between the two.

If this guide has been a refresher in the very best of ways, then you know you are ready for the next step of your art journey. Put the elements and principles of art into practice in your next artwork. Make it your best—and something you are proud of.

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Pattern is made by repeating or echoing the elements of an artwork to communicate a sense of balance, harmony, contrast, rhythm or movement.

There are two basic types of pattern in art: Natural Pattern and Man-Made Pattern. Both natural and man-made patterns can be regular or irregular, organic or geometric, structural or decorative, positive or negative and repeating or random.

Natural Pattern: Pattern in art is often based on the inspiration we get from observing the natural patterns that occur in nature. We can see these in the shape of a leaf and the branches of a tree, the structure of a crystal, the spiral of a shell, the symmetry of a snowflake and the camouflage and signalling patterns on animals, fish and insects.

Man-Made Pattern: Pattern in art is used for both structural and decorative purposes. For example, an artist may plan the basic structure of an artwork by creating a compositional pattern of lines and shapes. Within that composition he/she may develop its visual elements to create a more decorative pattern of color, tone and texture across the work.

Great artworks that feature the use of pattern.

The elements of art are sort of like atoms in that both serve as "building blocks" for creating something. You know that atoms combine and form other things. Sometimes they'll casually make a simple molecule, as when hydrogen and oxygen form water (H2O). If hydrogen and oxygen take a more aggressive career path and bring carbon along as a co-worker, together they might form something more complex, like a molecule of sucrose (C12H22O11).

A similar activity happens when the elements of art are combined. Instead of elements such as hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, in art you have these building blocks:

1. Line
2. Shape
3. Form
4. Space
5. Texture
6. Value
7. Color

Artists manipulate these seven elements, mix them in with principles of design, and compose a piece of art. Not every work of art contains every one of these elements, but at least two are always present.

For example, a sculptor, by default, has to have both form and space in a sculpture, because these elements are three-dimensional. They can also be made to appear in two-dimensional works through the use of perspective and shading.

Art would be sunk without line, sometimes known as "a moving point." While line isn't something found in nature, it is absolutely essential as a concept to depicting objects and symbols, and defining shapes.

Texture is another element, like form or space, that can be real (run your fingers over an Oriental rug, or hold an unglazed pot), created (think of van Gogh's lumpy, impasto-ed canvases) or implied (through clever use of shading).

Color is often the whole point for people who are visual learners and thinkers.

The elements of art are important for several reasons. First, and most importantly, a person can't create art without utilizing at least a few of them. No elements, no art—end of story. And we wouldn't even be talking about any of this, would we?

Secondly, knowing what the elements of art are enables us to:

1. describe what an artist has done
2. analyze what is going on in a particular piece
3. communicate our thoughts and findings using a common language

Musicians can talk about the key of "A," and they all know it means "a pitch relating to 440 oscillations per second of vibration." Mathematicians may use the very basic word "algorithm" and feel confident that most people know they mean "a step-by-step procedure for carrying out computation." Botanists world-wide will employ the name "rosa rugosa," rather than the much longer "that old-fashioned shrub rose - you know, the one that leaves hips in the fall - with the five-petaled flowers that can be yellow, white, red or pink." These are all specific examples of a common language coming in handy for intelligent (and shortened) discourse.

So it is with the elements of art. Once you know what the elements are, you can trot them out, time after time, and never put a wrong foot forward in the art world.

Does your instructor want you to write a few words and/or pages on a painting of your choice? Choose wisely, and then wax euphoric on form, lines, and color.

Have you found an unidentified work in your great-aunt's attic/toolshed/outhouse? It is helpful when describing the piece to someone who may be able to supply you with further information, to throw in some of the piece's elements of art along with: "It's an etching. It's on paper."

Stumped for conversation at a gallery show? Try "The artist's use of ________ (insert element here) is interesting." This is a much safer course than attempting to psychoanalyze the artist (after all, you may be standing in a clump of people that includes his or her mother) or using words which leave you a bit uncertain of exact meanings and/or pronunciations.

The elements of art are both fun and useful. Remember ​line, shape, form, space, texture, value and color. Knowing these elements will allow you to analyze, appreciate, write and chat about art, as well as being of help should you create art yourself.