Design Elements and Principles

Elements and principles are essential considerations to any artwork regardless of the art form or method used. They allow you to create a lasting effecting on your viewers. If you want to be a great artist, you want to make conscious design decisions before you put your pen to the page. It is much more time draining to try and insert them after. Here are a list of elements and principles will help you in your endeavor:

Elements

Are the parts that make of the artwork ie. Line, value, form, shape, texture, and space.

Value — Everything on the canvas has a degree of lightness or darkness. Value is the most basic and important element of design. The lighter value decreases in saturation towards white. These are known as tints. The darker values decrease in brightness towards black. These are known as shades. Finally, a tone is when gray is added.

Line — A stroke of value on a page. Edges are not lines but an indication of where one color ends and another begins. Lines have properties of thickness, darkness, gradience, and direction.

Shape — The combination of lines to create a two-dimensional representation. Start developing your ideas starting with simple shapes.

Form — The combination of shapes to the illusion of three dimensions. In other contexts, form may refer to correct posture, the materials and tools you use, or a set of questions to answer. These are also useful considerations but not usually what is intended by the word form in artistic compositions.

Space — The areas between the shapes and lines.

Texture — What the line, shape, or form would feel like if it had three dimensions and you touched it. Texture can be actual, implied, invented, or abstract.

Actual texture is more common in three-dimensional art where the textures are literally on the composition. You can see them and feel the texture. Implied texture is when you can tell what the real texture would be if you touched it. Invented texture is when the whole of the texture is replaced with an texture that is not a real texture. Abstract texture is when an unexpected texture is used in place of what one would expect.

Color — Color, also known as hue, is the ROYGBIV spectrum of light. Growing up you were likely taught that the primary colors are red, yellow, and blue. These are considered primary because you can create most colors using a combination of the three. In printing however, the primary colors used are cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (CMYK) to ensure the colors can be represented in ink. Red, green, and blue are used in computer art because it is based on subtractive color where adding more color leads to white rather than black. Colors are often associated with specific emotions.

Mixing complementary colors neutralizes the hue to brown. Choosing to mix a warm and cool color results in a muddy color. Any time you mix one color with another in additive color it increments towards black and becomes harder to distinguish. To address this issue, we have pantones which provide pure unmixed colors using natural pigments.

A color is transparent if you can see other elements through it. A non-transparent element is opaque.

A gradient is a color that changes to another hue or value. Color without a gradient is called flat.

Principles

Principles are the ways you use the elements in order for them to appear appealing. I believe the overarching principles are unity, balance, and emphasis. I have italicized elements when I mention how to use them within a principle of design. All problems, especially art related, are design problems. I have grouped related overlapping concepts into one of these three categories of principles as subhead concepts.

Unity — Consistent use of elements and principles across a canvas creating a sense of “oneness”.

Plan to use a specific color scheme in your composition such as monochromatic, analogous, complementary, split-complementary, triadic, or quadratic. Alignment is the idea of elements following a line. Contour continuation is the idea of aligned elements starting at the same angle as the last. Proportion, also known as scale, is the size of shapes or forms in comparison to one another.

Add Visual Metaphor refers to having a clear consistent image or deeper meaning behind the whole composition. Simplicity is ensuring that you place the right amount of detail. Too much detail and your intent gets lost in the details and the principles get too complex to remain unified. Lost and found or closure is when a viewer can assume a complete shape or form based on the alignment and contour continuation. It should be clear whether an element was intended to be repeated or varied.

• Repetition — A rhythm or pattern of the same elements creating movement and a feeling of belonging. You may repeat the same scale of shapes, forms, or line thickness.
• Gradation — Also known as stepping, gradation is the intentional use of elements in slightly altered ways such that it forms a pattern.
• Variation — Using a wide array of elements in unique ways such as through direction of line, disruption of shape, difference in shape, scale and color. Not enough variety leads to boring compositions. Too much variety is chaotic and unappealing to look at.

Balance — The degree of equal distribution of visual weight across an axis. The types of balance are symmetrical, asymmetrical, radial, and crystalogical. You should choose to either have your composition not be balanced or balanced. Somewhere in the middle usually appears awkward.

• Grouping — When a group of elements are clumped together it increases the visual weight of that area. Elements can also be grouped within another element so that they appear to belong to the container. When elements are isolated from the group they fall into the background.
• Positioning — We can change balance by how we position each element. We could use a grid or the rule of thirds. Positioning using a grid ensures that elements align in a specific way. The rule of thirds increases visual interest by taking the primary elements off center.

Emphasis — Also known as exaggeration, is using contrasting elements to draw the viewers' attention to one part of the canvas. Contrast is the difference of an element compared to the rest of the elements such as through an element’s color saturation, value, and hue. Start with value through creating a study of your art in grayscale. A value matrix is when you create this study using a limited number of colors such as 3. Then try to create a hue with a matching value and it will likely be much more effective.

• Dominance — Use of Elements that advance to the foreground or otherwise have the most visual weight are dominant. By dramatically using large amounts of one or many elements. The most dominant element is the center of interest or focal point. Overlapping creates dominance over the covered element. Depth results from stark changes in value. Darker values are dominant in day scenes but subordinate in the night. This is known as atmospheric perspective.
• Subordination — Decreasing visual weight of elements to let them sink into the background. Transparent colors, similar hues and values all create subordination.
• Visual Pace — Leading the viewers attentions from one part of the composition to the point of emphasis using dominance and subordination. Consistent lines often lead the viewer's eye. Our eyes then follow the contour towards the object with the next most visual weight. These lines are also created using linear perspective.

Depending on what art form you specialize in the elements and principles referred to may defer slightly but the ideas are the same. It is not necessary to use every element or principle of design to create a masterpiece, but they are always useful considerations when trying to understand what is or is not working to allow your art to give the impression you intended.