Master the 7 Elements of Art (And Instantly Improve Your Paintings)

Hey everyone, I am going to paint an abstract for you on this canvas. You're going to learn the seven foundational elements of art and how they work together. I think you're going to also learn a lot more than that and really how to apply the elements of art to your own art. So what are the elements of art? Line, shape, form, color, value, texture, scale. If we talk about line, there's all kinds of line that you can make. There's soft line, there's thin line and faint line, there's heavy and thick. Of course, you can change the color up in the line. The line can have fuzzy blurred edges or it can be sharp and graphic. There's so many ways to create line. What really makes good art is when you use the elements effectively and variety. If you have a line in your abstract or in your painting, but it's all same same. It's the same thickness, same color and it really doesn't vary or change. Then it's super boring, not very sophisticated. And that is what I tend to see in art that is not as good quality. Same with shape. You know, shapes can be all different types. They can be more geometric, they can be more organic. You can overlap shapes, you can have shapes utilizing the other element of scale and going from big to small, but a similar shape. You can have sort of poetry between shape and thinking about shape. There's negative shape, there's positive shape. There's a lot to cover when it comes to shape. A lot of ways to interpret that and utilize that into your artwork. So even just being conscious of the elements of art as you're creating is going to already elevate your art. What about form and what is form? So form is the sort of three dimensionality to an object or to a shape. You know, it could be a flat shape, but by putting dark underneath it, you've given it weight, you've given it mass. So it's the illusion of depth in how you create form. So there is a relationship between form and shape, form and scale and definitely value. If you look at this ball, the value that in the light source and the values that are in that ball is what gives it form. It gives it the illusion of that three dimensionality. Okay, color, that is a big one. And there's all kinds of different facets to color. There's saturation of color. It's like everybody is an artist now. If you have a smartphone, you pull up a photo, you adjust the value, you adjust the highlights, you adjust the color, you put some kind of filter on it. All those filters are is changing the form, changing the values, changing the color, changing the edges, sharpening them, blurring them, softening them. If you want to explore the elements of art, just look at your smartphone and the photo editing. So when it comes to color, of course, you have the hue. That is basically what color is it? Is it green? Is it blue? Is it red? Is it orange? That is the hue. And there's all kinds of color theory and color things that you can learn. Primary colors, tertiary colors, the relationship of color. We're not really going into that with this. This is more of an overview. But within hue, there's a lot of things to learn about color. Color also has a value. One color, say green, could be dark, but it could also be light depending on its value. And then we already talked about saturation. If it is heavily saturated, then it's going to have a very deep and intense version of that color versus a more muted version of that color. And having variety. So I kind of pre-planned that I'm going to do my abstract in a color relationship or a color story that I don't normally use, which is basically a violet and green gold combination. I'm going to play with saturation. Some of the colors are going to be muted and more dirty, like a grayish violet to a more intense deep magenta or fuchsia type violet. And then there's temperature. So your color could be warm or it could be cool. And I would say out of all the elements of art, the two that I think are most important are value and color. If you don't get color and value right, odds are really good your painting isn't going to be done or executed at a very high level. On the other hand, if you can really get a hold of color and get good with color and very intentional with color, and you can really work color to your advantage, and you nail your value, you will have a fantastic painting even if the rest of the elements of art sort of fall short. Okay, the next one is value, which I just said is extremely important. That's basically how dark or how light something is. There is a value scale from 0 to 10 or 1 to 10, 10 being the darkest and 01 being the lightest. And what you want, basically like this statue portrait, is all of the values represented. You want the dark, dark, darks and the highlights, the very light tones, and then all of those mid-tones. If you're drawing your painting is all in just the mid-tones and it's missing the darks or it's missing the lights, it doesn't make for a very good piece. So you want that contrast, you want all of the value shades represented. And if you are creating form with it, a three-dimensional illusion, just like this horse, just like this statue portrait, then you need your values to be correct. If it's supposed to be at a value 7 and you have it at a 4, it's going to be off. And likewise, if it's supposed to be a 4 and you have it too dark and it's an 8, it's going to be off. So you want correct value that shows what the light is actually doing. You want those to be accurate. So you really need to train your eye to see value and it's something anybody can learn in a very short period of time. Another thing you really want to train your eye to see is color in value because every color and saturation of color and how much tint or how much shade versus how much white or dark value is introduced into that color is going to alter the value of that color. So being able to see, let's say, true red right out of the tube and be able to know and understand what value that's at when it comes to painting and color, that is something you have to train your eye to see. It comes again through practice, but you can pick it up very quickly if that is a weak spot for you. Okay, texture. Now you can have visual texture, you can have actual texture. So actual texture you can create with impasto painting, so very thick, heavy paint. You can use various mediums like modeling paste to build up that texture, but you can also create the illusion of texture. So a lot of these paintings that you see here have an illusion of texture where there's a dry brush, for example, with that broken brush stroke that creates a texture. You can also create negative texture, like you can take your palette knife and scrape into your paint, scratch or remove a level to create a negative texture or a subtractive texture. So there's visual texture, actual texture, subtractive or the removal of texture, the absence of texture that creates in comparison to the other texture, texture. And I think texture is really big right now when it comes to especially abstract art. So scale is really important and I think it's one of the elements that can help you along with value and color and line, create depth. If you have big things and then smaller things, it's going to feel like one is closer than the other. If you look at this abstract here, there are shapes that are larger and shapes that are smaller. What that does is it creates this perception of depth. You want variety in your scale. You want very tiny things, small things, medium things, large things, things that overlap and touch each other. And that can be combined with the other elements of art as well. Don't forget there is a free workbook. You can download that absolutely for free. It will give you all the definitions of the elements of art that I just talked about, plus practical tips on how you can apply that to your artwork and creative prompts where you can apply those and really explore this. So that is exciting. So now it is time to get started. I collected these images. Some of them are like macro lenses of nature. I think these are germs or something. I don't know. So this is to just inspire me with a line. Some of this is to inspire me with composition, different elements that I can put in there. It's just basically inspiration. I will borrow from some of these to use into my abstract. I am going to start with just some washes. So I like to kind of start thin to thick. And I want to make sure that I don't make everything the same size. So I'm thinking about scale and I'm thinking about the composition sort of. And how much of one color do I want? Like how much geography of the violet do I want as opposed to the yellow and the green? And I think I want it dominant in the violet. I also want to incorporate some neutrals. I don't want everything to be just bright, intense color. So I am going to add some black, some white, some gray. In the beginning, you can just be very spontaneous. Just do stuff because it's just going to be built up in layers. I'm trying to kind of find a little bit of a composition. I'm thinking about background, resting space. What do I want maybe to come forward? Right now it's all kind of the same. But that is what I'm beginning to think about right now is what is going to be background? What might be further away and sort of atmospheric versus what is going to be a little bit closer? To get variety in the elements of art, you want to kind of use and capitalize on different tools. I'm using this varnish or this medium here. And I'm putting it on this scraper tool. I'm just kind of scraping through this transparent magenta just to see what I can get. In these base layers, I can afford mistakes. It's not a big deal to me. So now I'm kind of playing with the idea of texture by using this palette knife to kind of scratch into it. Always changing things up, always piling on the layers is really going to be a great way to achieve that variety in all the elements of art. And that is really what it takes to make a cool painting is adding all of that variety. Okay, well, just when I said I was not going to put an equal amount of violet and, you know, green gold, look what I've done. I've put an equal amount. So I can change that anytime. I can cover up some of this. I can add more of the violet. I kind of wanted this kind of green gold to be more of an accent color. The primary color, the more dominant color to be the violet. And I wanted to play with, like I said, saturation. I think at this point, I'm going to add spray paint. Sometimes, you know, you really like something and you kind of overdo it. And I don't want to do that. Maybe I will add, I don't know what's going to happen here. I'm just going to add this bright pink ink. I don't know if that was a good idea because now it's just going to all drift down. You know, if you blow it, you just kind of, ooh, have a happy accident. Look at that. I am liking that a lot. I would call this a very good, strong base. You know, the makings of a background down in here, all of the areas that are blended, not at war with each other. You don't notice them. They sort of sit back and kind of disappear into the background. That's going to be my far away, my background. Because with an abstract and all your art, you want depth. Now down in here, again, it's very mellow. You know, not a lot of contrast happening. So it's receding. And this over here is kind of receding. And these are acting as resting space. And I don't want to make this so busy. I kind of want to keep all my busy parts to a certain area and let the rest of it sort of be resting space for your eye. Otherwise, you just get overwhelmed. Next, I need to start pulling some of these areas forward. And I need more saturated color. I need highlights. If I squint my eyes at it, I don't have too many dark, dark, darks. This is about the only area here and a little bit in there. And I don't have too many light tones. Most of my values are between three and seven. So I need some dark, darks. And I need some highlights in particular for the value to really work. I think it's dry enough to kind of work with. So I'm going to work with my opaques. And I'm going to try to get some lighter values in here. To try to get this to kind of go back, I'm working on what is furthest away, the background to what is closest to us. So I'm just scumbling here, which is just using a very thin layer of paint and scrubbing the canvas to put a very thin, kind of hazy, gauzy layer of paint on here to create that illusion of a mist. I really like the glass palette because you can just clean up super fast and easy by using a straight-edged razor and just scraping it. You don't get those paint boogers from the dry paint. So fast and easy. I think I'm going to do some stuff in here with the roller because it's going to add kind of this almost impasto texture to it. Okay, so now it's time for a smaller brush. I'm going to use this medium filbert here. I'm going to just kind of work to intensify a few things. In the initial, when I'm first starting, I think about color a lot because, you know, you're kind of laying the foundation of the color that you want to have. And then I've been thinking about value a lot and I'm trying to like pull these highlights here, you know, in certain areas. I lightened up a lot of things. I pushed that differential of the values. I'm thinking of scale. I don't want everything, you know, the same size. This brush stroke, this brush stroke, this brush stroke. They're different sizes. And now I'm kind of working more on the foreground. And that's where these idea boards can help me. I'm going to really look at these charcoal abstract drawings for inspiration. And, you know, I think this pen is kind of cool. So playing off of some of the stuff that's already there a little bit, you know, messing around and using it in different ways. And at this stage, you know, again, I can come in with paint and cover some things up if I don't like it, if it's not working for me. Also, I kind of like to connect things from edge to edge. Just like in non-abstract painting, you want your objects to kind of touch the edges or go off the edges in three parts. That's kind of a thing that's out there. So I think charcoal just gives just such a beautiful element because you can just do something like that, you know, come in with a dry brush, play with it a little bit. And as soon as you spray it, you know, it's there to stay. I really like charcoal because you can do a lot with it. And it's very forgiving. I was going for this to be the focal point. You know, focal points are so easy. You can literally just put like a fluorescent pink dot or something and it'll work. I feel like our eye really does want to go there. There's not enough drawing us there yet, but I can just come in and mess around with the values and push the contrast for that. And, you know, we got this nice lead-in with this lime green here. Okay, so this was really, really fun. I enjoyed exploring the elements of art with you. I had a lot of fun creating this piece. If you enjoyed watching this video, then you will absolutely love the Mastery Program. It's going to help you build your skill, find your voice, develop your style, and create a business plan that works for you so you know how to promote and sell your artwork as a professional artist. Be sure to check the link in the description below.