What are the Elements of Art? Value addition!

So let's talk about the Elements of Art, and how they impact our everyday lives.

Yes, I am talking about this after my more serious posts.

But follow me on this for a moment. Art, and more importantly the Elements of Art, effect every aspect of your day-to-day life and most people can not name more than four of them.

Here get a piece of paper again as well as a writing device of your choice. There will be several questions so give yourself some room to continue working.

Question number one: Without using an outside device, and solely based on your own understanding of art, write down the different elements of art.

So unless you are an artist, or an educator of some sort, a lot of people just drew a complete blank on that. So to make things a lot easier on everyone if you ever have any questions about art terms go to this site right here. Artlex.com. Bookmarked that yet? Good let's move on.

The elements of art are as follows:

Do not worry the explanation on how they effect your life will follow over a series of blog posts.

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

Now to explain how these have an impact on our lives...

1. Value- a measurement of light and darkness. To put it simply, Value deals with how much light there is in something.


The first way to point out how the artistic term of value is used by everyone in the real world is...

When you go out deer hunting and you're trying to pick out a deer from the underbrush, you are using your understanding of Value to pick out the details.

If you don't like the hunting analogy, you can always think of this as trying to walk through the house at night and trying not to step on any LEGOS'.

I give these two examples as the most upfront examples of use for the Elements of Art. But it gets a little more complex in a minute.

Take your paper and and do this.

Write down a top-down layout of your home. Take your time and mark where north is. (Your work does not have to be perfect). No one is grading it but yourself. But if you want to send in your pics my twitter is @TheLeer1. So send them in so we can all see.

Done with your sketch?

Now take a look at your drawing. Since you have marked North, you will be able to pick out which sides face East and West. Now we all know the sun rises in the east so we can pick out which rooms have the most light in the morning. These rooms have the highest value, and the rooms facing west have the darkest value in the morning.

How does knowing about value effect our lives? The rooms with the highest value are not the rooms you want to put your kids in, unless you want them to be the first ones awake each and every day. Yes this example may be pulled from my own daily life. If you want your kids to sleep in, put them in a West-facing room or impede the ability for light to get in the room. Light damping blinds and shades are your tools here. Again these objects affect the room's Value using the artist definition.

Now a word about value in the classroom.

Often this is taught to students by having them do a grey scale in paint or charcoal. In a more liberal project you can have students cut out newspaper clippings and build a value scale that way. This is often followed up by taking the value scale and building a portrait from a black and white picture from the value scales. To see an example you can see what someone named Tsukareru has posted online.

But this is costly in the amount of time you have to teach multiple lessons during the year. Also, unless you have a filling system for students to keep your massive collection of paper clippings, you're going to run out of room quickly and students will start "missing" their work.

I say missing because anyone who has had to teach art has heard "someone stole my work" so many times it haunts their dreams.

So give yourself a pat on the back you took a one question quiz and had to do a sketch of your home. All so you can find out for yourself what Value means as opposed to when a teacher tries to explain it to you. Some of you forgot this information or didn't learn it the first time in school.

Don't worry, we all fall down, it only is failure when we don't pick ourselves up again.

- The Leer