The Little Art School’s Joanne Robinson guides you through the ‘Formal Elements of Art’ by simplifying each element so they are easy to understand.
There’s something slightly intimidating about the term ‘Formal Elements of Art’; perhaps it’s the word ‘Formal’, but I encourage you to move past that.
Elements are the building blocks of drawing and painting, so it’s well worth understanding them. In total, there are seven formal elements;
- Line
- Shape
- Tone
- Form
- Space
- Colour
- Texture
I’ll explore each element of art and explain why each is important to your work as an artist or what to look out for in a painting if you’re an art lover just discovering how to appreciate art.
Formal Element of Art One – Line
Pick up your pencil and draw a line. Start with a straight line and then a curved line.
That’s all line is. Lines can be horizontal, vertical, diagonal, dotted or dashed.
Get a piece of paper now and look at the many ways you can draw a line!
Lines help define shapes and guide the viewer’s eye to a focal point in the artwork. It’s the line that leads the eye. For me, every drawing and painting starts with a line.
When I think of a line, I imagine Picasso’s line drawings. Picasso could simplify an object into a single line or several lines.
Look at this simple Picasso line drawing, his famous ‘Dove’, and have a go at drawing it.
Formal Element of Art Two – Shape
Within our Online Drawing and Painting Art Course, you spend the first term focusing entirely on SHAPE. Look at this first lesson from our course, ‘Inveraray Castle’. We’ve included a link to the Inverary Castle website for anyone interested in viewing the beautiful exterior.
Inverary Castle
We begin Lesson 1 by returning the castle to its most basic shape: a rectangle and two cylinders.
Then, we move on to develop that basic shape with the details, each of which is simply another shape.
The shapes become more complex as we move through the art course, but the principles are precisely the same.
Parisian Cafe
Take a look at this drawing from Lesson 40 of our online art course. It seems incredibly complex.
However, if you break it down to the very basic shapes, you can see it simply starts with a rectangle and two cylinders.
The drawing is simply line and shape.
The more you practise, the more this begins to feel like second nature. Artists in our online art course discuss starting to see the basic shapes as they go about their daily lives.
Line and shape are where every drawing or painting begins, but then we move on to another key element: tone.
Formal Element of Art Three – Tone
Tone in painting refers to the relative lightness or darkness of a colour. It started to make sense to me when I began thinking of it in monochrome.
We teach our students at the Little Art School about tone by initially thinking just in terms of black, grey and white.
Below, we have a simple set of those three tones, from white to black, with a grey in the middle:
Look at the simple ‘Glasgow Skyline’ painting below. Can you see the three tones? Black, grey and white. This is the first lesson in our Online Art Course’s ‘Tone’ term.
When we think tonally, we are looking for darks and lights. This simple ‘tonal band’ has four more greys, giving us a choice of tones.
Look at the drawing of Vivian Leigh below (this is Lesson 70 of our course) and half close your eyes. Can you see the darkest darks?
Now look again and find the very lightest lights.
When we are searching for tonal contrast, what we’re looking for is generally light and shadow.
Look at the portrait again. Can you work out where the light is coming from?
Look how the light falls on the left side of the face, leaving the right in shadow; by drawing tonally, we can create that light and shadow, more of that to come with element four, form!
Some books, videos and art teachers use the term ‘value’ instead of ‘tone’.
The terms are interchangeable, and both mean the same thing: the degree of light and dark in a painting, which ranges from white to black. The greys in between are called middle values or middle tones.
Understanding Tone or Value is vital in art. For an in-depth look at tone, please read our blog post ‘Tone Definition in Art’.
“Learn the rules like a pro,so you can break them like an artist.”
Pablo Picasso
Formal Element of Art Four – Form
Every list I’ve seen of the ‘Formal Elements of Art’ puts form before tone, but for me, you really have to understand what is meant by tone to understand how to create form.
So I’m putting form fourth; this is a personal view based on years of trying to understand these elements myself and then teaching how to draw and paint to others.
A form is a three-dimensional object with a volume of height, width and depth.
Think about objects like cubes, spheres and cylinders. Look at the shapes we discussed with Inverarie Castle at the start of the blog post. There, we have simple shapes, but we add tone to turn a shape into the illusion of form.
This is Edward Hopper’s ‘Lighthouse at Two Lights’, which we tackle in our art course at Lesson 110.
Look at the lighthouse tower. Can you see the dark tones on the right and the light on the left?
This turns a simple shape into the impression of a 3D shape; it gives the illusion of form.
We can create the illusion of form by understanding how light reacts to the object. The more I research art, the more I draw, paint, and teach, and the more I see the light and shadow at the heart of everything. This can also help you to appreciate art.
Artists use shading, perspective, shadows and other techniques to create the illusion of a three-dimensional form on a two-dimensional surface.
Take a look at this ‘Wee Dram’ drawing below.
This drawing began with lines and shapes. Then, the tone was added using lights and darks, which gives it form.
Can you see how all the first four art elements work together?
They aren’t abstract academic terms; instead, they are a practical way of learning how to draw and paint and how to view art.
Formal Element of Art Five – Space
While learning to draw and paint, I kept reading and hearing about ‘negative space’. I had no idea what it meant.
As this was before the days of being able to search a term in a second on the internet, it took a few years until I had a ‘penny drop’ moment and realised firstly what negative space was, and secondly why it was vitally important.
Now, space is constantly on my mind when drawing and painting.
The painting below is a simple tonal watercolour of Clark Gable and Grace Kelly (Lesson 75 of our online art course).
When I started learning to draw, my focus would have been on the shapes and the figures themselves; this is the positive space.
Learning about space was a game-changer for me because it forces the mind to focus on how the shapes relate to each other—what is the space between them?
Look at the area between the two figures – this is the negative space.
Now look at the painting below of the saxophonist (Lesson 94 of our art course).
When I was drawing this, I focused on the spaces between the shapes; I looked at the shape between the arms and the shape between the top of the saxophone and the player’s body – those are negative shapes.
When you start drawing and painting, thinking about these spaces transforms your ability to draw and paint realistically.
Formal Element of Art Six – Colour
Let’s introduce colour into the mix of formal elements!
Colour can evoke emotions and set the mood of a piece. Artists use colour schemes to make areas or subjects stand out more.
Colour has three main characteristics:
- Hue
This is the colour itself: red, green, blue; I think of it as the colour that comes from the tube as I squeeze it onto my palette. - Value
Back to our tone element, this is how light or dark the colour is. - Chroma or Intensity
This is how bright or dull the colour is
This is the Colour Wheel we use at the Little Art School. We spend a lot of time talking about colour and teaching colour theory.
The wheel shows the three primary colours (P), red, blue and yellow, and then the secondary three (S), green, purple and orange.
It then shows the six tertiary colours.
Complementary colours are created by going across the colour wheel. This iris (Lesson 24) uses the complementary colours yellow and purple.
Analogous colours use a section of the wheel. We paint Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in our course (Lesson 89) as an example of using colours from a section of the wheel.
Colours can be described as warm (red, yellow) or cool (blue, grey), depending on which end of the colour spectrum they fall. We spend an entire term exploring this as there are many complexities.
It’s impossible to summarise ‘colour’ succinctly; the subject is vast, and I’m barely touching the surface here!
However, colour is a vital formal element of art.
Formal Element of Art Seven – Texture
Texture in art appeals to our sense of touch. Texture means how the surface of something looks or feels. As artists, we can use our skills to create an illusion of an object’s texture.
Take a look at this pencil still-life drawing.
Look at how tone, line, shape, and form have been used to make the glass look smooth and represent the bumps and form on the candlestick.
The paper itself is soft, but the texture is implied.
Texture is used to describe the real surface quality of the work; the surface can be tactile (of or connected with the sense of touch).
This painting of an alpaca is based on our texture term in the art course.
If you could touch it, you’d feel the brush strokes in the background; the paint was thickly applied to create a heavily textured effect.
To add to the textural element, string and sponge have been integrated into the surface.
You don’t need to add actual texture, though, to see its effects.
Using different mark-making techniques, artists can make similarly shaped objects look like very different textures.
Bringing Together the Formal Elements of Art
When I started learning to draw and paint, I made a list of the essential things I needed to consider when drawing or painting. Looking back, I realise these elements are what I was listing, but I had no idea they were the formal elements of art at the time.
That is why this list makes sense; these elements and principles of art were not invented as something to revise for a test and then forget about.
The formal elements of art have evolved because they lie at the heart of planning, creating and viewing art.
Let’s finish by looking at one of the later paintings in our art course, a complex portrait:
Although this looks difficult, the whole painting starts here, with lines.
Then shapes were built; space and form were created using light and shadow, and tonal value lies at its heart.
The knowledge of how to use colour informed many decisions when painting this, and finally, mark-making created texture in the hair. It all comes together – not as a theoretical list, but in the practice of drawing and painting.
At the Little Art School, we teach traditional art skills, enabling our students to draw and paint realistically first. For this reason, my Elements are not about creating abstract art.
Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and many abstract artists who followed them all began with the formal elements of art and then abstracted line, shape, tone, form, colour, and texture to create their art.
I haven’t covered that here. As you can see from the paintings I’ve selected, I believe you need to learn the building blocks before you can decide what to lose to create abstraction.
As Picasso said, “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist”.
Our Online Art Course
If you’d like to learn to draw and paint following a structured and progressive art course, look at our Drawing and Painting Course at the Little Art School. Our Online Art Course allows you to work in your own time and at your own pace.
Unlike other online courses, we send you all the art materials you need to complete the course.
The Little Art School provides a nurturing environment and a thriving online community that comes together in a spirit of kindness and help.
YouTube Video on Formal Elements of Art
We’ve created a YouTube video on the Formal Elements of Art to accompany this blog post.