Let's take a look at the elements of art and how we can use these principles to create
more interesting digital artwork.
So the elements of art are the fundamental components of a painting or an illustration
or even like a sculpture, any kind of art that's visual art.
The seven elements are texture, form, space, shape, color, value, and line.
And most artwork contains one or more of these elements, usually more than one.
Most artists use them unintentionally, but you can use them intentionally as well just
to make your artwork more appealing to people who are going to look at it.
So I'm going to show you some different examples of how I use it and just explain what each
of these do and how you can use them for your work.
So we'll start with texture.
Texture is sometimes implied by using different colors and different values like I did here.
I'm implying kind of a marble texture even though it doesn't really physically have a
texture because it's just on my screen.
However, it looks like it has a texture.
Texture could also be an actual physical texture.
You could have the texture of clay if you have a sculpture or you could have the texture
of oil paint on canvas if you do traditional paintings on canvas.
So there's lots of ways to use texture.
Texture really makes something look like it exists and it's in an environment and it's
real and it's especially good to use if you're doing digital art because it's going to make
your artwork look more physical.
So texture is really easy to use and painter a couple of the ways really quickly to do
it without going into too much detail.
You can use the custom sponge to throw on some texture or you could even use the square
chalk brush along with a paper texture here to paint in some texture.
You can watch my video on texture to learn more about how to do this in more detail.
Let's look at an example of texture from one of the paintings I did in 2012.
You can see in this painting I used a lot of texture in this piece all along the wall
here and on the ground especially I want it to look like there's a lot of just little
bits of rocks and gravel and things and then it works really well too on the person's clothing
here where I put this brown texture that looks like dirt and it makes it look really weathered
and really used.
If I hadn't done that you might not really get the point of this painting that the person
is not really in a very good condition here.
So the next one we have is form.
Form relates to three dimensionality of a shape or an object and so in this example
I've used the airbrush to shade some of this and kind of distorted it a little bit to make
it look like it has a form like maybe it's three dimensional plastic.
Form works together with shape but again form relates more to three dimensionality.
Form is a combination of primitive shapes generally so in this example this F is a cylindrical
shape combined with a couple more cylindrical shapes.
The O is just a torus and then the same thing with the rest of the other shapes here they're
just combinations of primitive shapes so often times when you're drawing you'll use primitive
shapes to build up your form and if you're drawing a head and then a neck and then a
torso and shoulders and so on you're using form to establish that.
You're also using color and value along with shape to establish this form so you'll notice
that some of these go together you know form works with shape and color and value so a
lot of these are interchangeable with each other some are dependent on each other even.
Let's take a look at an example of form.
Here I have another painting that I did in 2012 and we have this spherical shape here
now if I didn't pay attention to my form and imply that form by shading it properly using
value and color and texture this would look like a flat disc it wouldn't look like a round
sphere so I had to imply that form when I was drawing it.
Same thing goes with the body down here there's a lot of form implied in this painting here
and getting it right really makes or breaks the piece as far as trying to translate this
really simple message here.
Next we will move on to space and space can be positive space or negative space this would
be positive space and outside of that would be negative space so in this example of space
there's different levels of space there's this area outside there's the white area surrounding
it and then there's the negative space inside so there's three levels of space here.
Space is generally almost always used in your artwork because you know you either have to
fill the page or not fill the page so you're going to be using space no matter what whether
intentionally or unintentionally it's generally used for composition in this case for this
diagram I made here I've used space I have everything kind of more or less you know centered
and there's a certain amount of space between everything I just kind of did this you know
naturally however I felt like doing it I didn't have to you know read the instructions on
how to space things I just kind of did it this way so again you'll probably do a lot
of these things naturally but it's just nice to know that they're there if you weren't
aware of them so we'll take a look at space here's a painting I did last year of a peacock
it's got the body of the peacock taking up the positive space and then the negative
space is taken up by the tail and the rest of the composition furthermore I use the
rule of thirds to divide the canvas into equal segments and you can see that running down
the center to thirds that's where I place the peacock's body and then everything else
takes up the rest so multiple uses of space here in this painting
the next to look at is shape and as I mentioned before shape kind of is similar to form it
works with form but it's slightly different shape deals more with 2D and form is more
3D so shape is kind of the contour and then if you were to fill it in and make it look
three dimensional then that would be form so they are kind of interchangeable so in
this shape here I have it as kind of the shape of a fish just so you can see you know it's
more of a contour thing to show you an example of shape we have this piece I did here I did
this one also last year and you can see it doesn't really have any form to it as far
as three dimensional shading goes but there is form implied by using shapes on top of
shapes or intersecting shapes or cutting shapes out of each other there's a lot of three dimensional
depth without anything really being actually three dimensional it's all kind of two dimensional
shapes I don't know what this is I can't begin to describe it it's just kind of an abstract
piece I did I just kind of started doodling and you know that's what it ended up as it's
a really good use of space and you can also see as I mentioned earlier I used some of
the other elements in conjunction with shape I used texture here on this background and
the whole thing kind of has a texture to it so that shape the next one is color color
is pretty straightforward it deals more with the hue here and colors really easy to pick
and curl a painter you have your hue ring here you can pick any hue you want and you
can fine tune the color however you want we're going to deal more with the color right now
rather than value so color seems pretty easy right you just pick a color well you want
to think more about that you want to pick colors that harmonize with each other that
look good when they're next to each other or group together so I have a video on color
theory that you can watch that'll give you some more insight into that but basically
you want to use colors that are harmonious so for instance this yellow here is the complementary
color of this blue down here at the bottom so if you use these two together it's going
to make your artwork look really interesting I'll do it for as an example here these two
colors go really nicely together you could say the same for magenta and this aqua color
the color is very important and how you use it is very important you don't want to just
throw down colors randomly if you want your artwork to look good so an example of color
would be this this is just a big mess I don't know what it's supposed to be I'm just kind
of playing around with color in this example here so what I was much interested in is how
this gray perceptually changes when it's surrounded by all of this magenta here so the magenta
is so bright and overwhelming that when the gray is next to it the gray kind of takes
on this aqua kind of green tint and when I mentioned earlier about the complementary
colors we have this magenta here opposite from it is aqua and so what's kind of happening
is we're kind of almost perceiving this gray as being some color here with a little bit
of the opposite complementary color influenced in it so I don't know if you can see it in
this example because there's some other colors going on here but if you were to cover up
part of the screen and only look at just a little area here this gray and some of these
grays might look like they're kind of tinted towards green a little bit like they're not
actually pure gray we can see that by sampling these colors here I'm sampling this gray here
you can see that it's just a neutral gray but with all this other magenta around it
it looks a little different so a couple little other colors in here like this blue just for
fun and over here I actually did shift the color perceptually towards the screen that
I was talking about so it's kind of interesting what I see here this color I also kind of
see over in all of the other grays too so it's just a kind of way to mess with people's
heads when they're looking at your art you can use color to do that and this piece really
only focuses on color I wasn't trying to use any of the other elements here even though
I did unintentionally there's some spatial relations between the gray and there's some
line and there's some texture and things so moving on from color we'll go to value next
and value is essentially the percentage of lightness or darkness that something has so
white to black and everything in the middle doesn't necessarily have to be just black
and white it could be dark blue or light blue could be monochromatic you use a value in
a lot of different ways to change your color or to establish your form or even texture
so value is very important it also really establishes contrast and you need contrast
in a piece for it to really stand out for people to be able to see things clearly so
an example of value is this piece here that I made last year in 2012 and you can see it
doesn't have a whole lot of hue going on there's only one hue it's kind of this orange yellow
hue and that doesn't change really the only thing that changes is the value so we have
a dark hue here and then if we sample around we can see it's really just moving lighter
and darker in value and it's the balance the ratio of this dark to light and everything
in the middle that creates contrast you have to have this contrast for things to look good
especially if you're doing realistic artwork so you should practice doing monochromatic
or black and white paintings to get better at this it really helps you get good at shading
because then you're not thinking about color and hue so much finally we have line and line
can be just a bunch of lines you know you can draw a bunch of spaghetti and that could
be your artwork or you can use lines to enhance your forms which is what I'm doing here so
these lines are kind of just following contours and kind of making things stick out they're
delineating from the form so what you want sometimes is a good balance of form and line
and if you have too much form and not enough line your artwork might not look as good and
same goes the other way around if you have too much line and not enough form you know
if your artwork is just a bunch of senseless spaghetti you know it might not really look
that good but even this is a form so sometimes there's no way of getting out of making a
painting more elements in art than you intend to make they kind of just happen that's the
cool thing about them that's what makes them the fundamental elements of art so let's take
a look at an example of line as our last example so painting I did in 2011 and I'm really
concentrating on lines and brush strokes in this primarily secondarily maybe color and
third is texture but it's just a bunch of lines and I know that sounds really fundamental
but when you look at it it kind of looks like maybe it's a really close up of some woven
fabric or some natural fiber you know in biology you know collagen or something weird so it's
really you know this is mostly lines but it looks really cool and again as I mentioned
earlier most of these paintings if not all of them have more than one or a lot of the
elements of art that I described so this has texture and color and value space you know
it's got pretty much everything to it doesn't really have a whole lot of form really because
everything fills the screen and I didn't really do a whole lot of three dimensional shading
but there's some stuff there I guess there's in a way a form implied by this lattice makes
kind of a bulging grid so maybe this does have everything but it's interesting to look
at your work and see what you've used and what you haven't and again as I mentioned
it's not something that you have to use or you have to think about you don't have to
have this list next to you and check them off one by one and go you know okay that I use
texture okay good and I use form right you don't have to worry about that just do it
automatically and then if you need some inspiration now and then and you don't know where to start
on something think about one of these concepts you know and start with that space is generally
the easiest to start with and just figure out where everything is going to be positioned
I have a video on composition you can watch coming up soon that'll help you with the rule
of thirds and spatial relations and all of that stuff so have fun applying this to your
digital artwork I encourage you to experiment with all of these and thanks for watching.
