Artistic and Creative Ability

• Art is a broad range of human activities that create visual, auditory, or performed artifacts (artwork) to express the author's imaginative or technical skill.
• Creativity is the ability to generate or recognize ideas, alternatives, or possibilities that may be useful to solve problems, communicate with others, and entertain.

Artistic vs. Creative Ability

• Artistic ability refers to skills and talent in fine art creation.
• Creative ability refers to imagination and problem-solving talent.

Benefits of Arts

• Significant benefits exist for learning and engagement in schooling via the arts.
• Form and content cannot be separated; how something is communicated shapes the content of the experience.
• Open-ended tasks allow for imagination, which is an important human aptitude.

Characterizing Artistically Literate Individuals

• Artistically literate individuals use various artistic media, symbols, and metaphors.
• They develop personal creative realization.
• They cultivate cultural and historical connections.
• They find inspiration and intellectual stimulation in art.
• They support and seek artistic experiences.

Elements of Art

Line

• Defines shape, direction, and movement.
• Lines in art can convey the subject and meaning of the work.
• Horizontal lines suggest serenity, calmness, and stability.
• Vertical lines suggest poise, balance, force, and dynamism.
• Diagonal lines suggest action and movement, with the angle indicating the degree of action.
• Curved lines suggest flexibility, joyousness, and grace.

Color

• Wavelengths of light translated into visual perception by the brain.

Three dimensions of color:

• Hue: Names the color (e.g., red, blue).
• Value: Lightness or darkness of a color, also known as “chiaroscuro”.
• Saturation: Brightness or dullness of a color.

Psychological effects of Color:

• Black: Gloom and mourning.
• Blue: Calmness and peace.
• Red: Passion, energy, and warmth; can also represent fire, blood, danger, bravery, or war.
• Gray: Weight, solidity, and neutrality.
• Violet: Shadows, mourning, penance, royalty, and power.
• Green: Growth, freshness, and hope.
• White: Simplicity, clarity, purity, and innocence.
• Orange: Deliciousness, sweetness, and assertiveness.
• Yellow: Life, joy, sunshine, cheerfulness, warmth, freedom, and hospitality.
• Pink: Sympathy and gratitude.
• Brown: Wholesomeness, stability, and reliability.

Texture

• The feel of surfaces, perceived through the sense of touch (rough, smooth, shiny, etc.).

Perspective

• Allows us to perceive distance and the position of objects.

Two kinds of Perspective:

• Linear perspective uses converging lines.
• Aerial perspective uses relative distances of objects indicated by gradation of tone and color.

Space

• The distance or area between, around, above, below, or within shapes.
• Form/Shape:
• Describes the structure or shape of an object.

Volume

• The three-dimensional aspect of objects in art.
• Refers to solidity or thickness.

Principles of Design

Harmony

• A pleasing relationship between elements, essential to beauty.
• Achieved when the various parts of a design give an appearance of belonging together.

Balance

• Provides a sense of stability and rest.
• Exists when a feeling of balance and equilibrium is achieved.

Proportion

• Proper size relationships determined by comparing the sizes of different parts.

Rhythm

• Achieved by the regular or harmonious recurrence of lines, forms, and colors.

Emphasis

• Produced by a design or form that catches our attention while the rest are subordinated.
• Important in all art forms.

Movement

• Visual flow through the composition.

Contrast

• Created by placing or arranging very different things next to each other.

Types of Contrast:

• Color Contrast (different colors).
• Size Contrast (different sizes).