General Art Terms
A drawing including the head, neck, shoulders and sometimes the arms. It tells or communicates a story about the person.
Portrait
Red, yellow, and blue. Mix these pigment colors to produce the rest of the colors.
Primary Colors
A quick drawing that captures the gestures and movements of the body.
Gesture Drawing
An art element with three properties: hue, value, and intensity.
Color
The area of a picture that appears farthest away in three-dimensional illusion.
Background
A collection of an artist's work.
Portfolio
Colors such as black, white, gray, or brown, that are NOT associated with the color spectrum.
Neutral Colors
The range from white through gray to black, modified gradually.
Value Scale
An element of art that is used to define space, contours, and outlines, or suggest mass and volume.
Line
The line at which sky and earth meet.
Horizon Line
A written credit to the artist or work under study.
Attribution
Green, violet, and orange are made by mixing two primary colors.
Secondary Colors
A method of applying perspective to an object or figure so that it seems to recede in space by shortening the depth dimension, making the form appear three-dimensional.
Foreshortening
Shape
In pictures, ____ are the figures and _____ make up the ground.
Positive and Negative Shapes
The materials, such as oil, watercolor, etc., used to create an artwork; or a category of art such as drawing, painting, or sculpture.
Medium (pl. Media)
The range of values of one color.
Monochromatic
The representation of three-dimensional objects on a flat surface to produce the same impression of distance and relative size as that received by the human eye.
Perspective
An element of design, the surface quality of an artwork usually perceived through the sense of touch, but can also be perceived visually.
Texture
The area of a picture that appears to be closest to the viewer.
Foreground
A systemic discussion of the characteristics of an artwork, usually involving four stages: description, analysis, interpretation, and evaluation.
Art Criticism
Yellow-green, blue-green, red-violet, blue-violet, red-orange, yellow-orange are made by mixing a secondary color with an adjacent primary color.
Tertiary (or Intermediate) Colors
The diminishing of color intensity to lighter and duller hues to give the illusion of distance.
Aerial Perspective
An element of design that appears three-dimensional and encloses volume such as a cube, sphere, pyramid, or cylinder.
Form
Lines that define the outer edges of forms and surfaces within a form, such as shapes, or wrinkles and folds.
Contour Line