The Basics - Principles of Art

The Principles of art include colour, line, shape, movement, texture, proportion and balance. The two main principles focused on here will be colour and line techniques.

The Colour Wheel

One of the basics in art is knowing the colour wheel. Knowing what colours mix and what colours don't.

Primary Colours are red, blue and yellow. Secondary Colours are created when 2 Primary Colours are mixed together. Similarly Tertiary Colours are created when a Primary Colour is mixed with a Secondary Colour.

This image shows a typical colourwheel demonstrating primary, secondary and tertiary colours.

These 2 videos explain how colours mix and go from primary colours through to secondary colours.

Line Techniques

Another basic in art is the use of line techniques. There are various techniques to using line in art such as hatching, cross hatching, gestural line to create gestural drawings, continuous line, countour line, stippling and more. Using these techniques can give different effects to your work whether it be shading, depth. persepctive or a sense of movement.

Hatching

Hatching is an artistic technique used to create tonal or shading effects by drawing (or painting or scribing) closely spaced parallel lines.

Cross Hatching

Cross Hatching is similar to hatching however parallel lines going in the opposite direction are drawn over the top of hatched lines.

Gesture Drawings

Gesture drawings are created in a short amount of time and gesture that something is there, it is often used as the basis of artwork before detail is added.

Continuous Line

Continuous Line drawings are made by not lifting the drawing tool off the paper.

Countour Line

Contour Line drawings are basically the outline of a drawing without any technicalities or shading included.

Stippling

Stippling is a drawing technique by which an artwork is created simply by making dots on the paper. The closer together the dots the darker the area and the further apart the dots the lighter the area.

This image shows examples of the different types of line drawings.

This video demonstrates some of the techniques mentioned and more.