Artform: A kind of artifact, such as a painting, drawing, sculpture, textile, photograph, product, or graphic design.

Artist's Context: The life history, experiences, and time influencing an artist's work.

Background: On a two-dimensional surface, what appears farthest from the viewer in a three-dimensional representation.

Bird's-Eye View: A point of view from a very high level looking down at a space or object.

Coherence: The criterion that interpretations ought to make sense as thoughts in themselves independent of the artifact.

Color: The effect on our eyes of different wavelengths or frequencies of an electromagnetic spectrum that is infinite and continuous. Color consists of hue, intensity, and value.

Color Spectrum: The portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that is visible to the human eye.

Color Wheel: A circular arrangement of the colors of the visible spectrum.

Complementary Color Scheme: Variations in color based on colors opposite each other on the color wheel.

Completeness: The criterion that interpretations ought to account for all that is in an artifact.

Contour: An actual or implied outline bounding a shape.

Contour Line: An actual line or implied line that defines the outer limits of a three-dimensional object or two-dimensional shape; sometimes synonymously used with "outline."

Contrast: 1. The degree of value difference in an image; high contrasts is a wide separation between dark and light; low contrast is a narrow range of values in an image. 2. The use of opposing aspects of the elements of art to produce an intensified effect.

Cross-Hatching: Crisscrossing straight lines, one atop the other.

Design Elements: Visual components of artifacts, including point, line, texture, shape, mass, volume, space, color, value, time, motion, words, and sound.

Diagonal Force: An arrangement of elements along a diagonal axis, often expressing dynamism, agitation, and vigor.

Directional Force: Arrangements of elements that can move the viewer's attention to an artifact's focal point.

Dissonance: Lack of harmony or agreement between elements in a work.

Focal Point: An area of an artifact that grasps and holds a viewer's attention.

Foreground: On a two-dimensional surface, what appears closest to the viewer in a three-dimensional representation.

Geometric forms: three-dimensional forms exhibiting height, width, and depth e.g. sphere, cube, cone, cylinder, and pyramid.

Geometric shapes: flat man-made shapes which are more precise and mathematical in proportion e.g. circle, ellipsis, square, rectangle, and triangle.

Gestalt Psychology: An aspect of cognitive psychology developed in the early twentieth century by German psychologists and philosophers investigated how the mind seeks unity and closure. The gestalt of an artifact is the general feeling it evokes in viewers--their response to the whole object.

Golden Rectangle, Root 5 Rectangle: A rectangle derived by the ancient Greeks from the Golden Section; its length is the square root of 5.

Golden Section, Golden Mean: A line sectioned so the ratio of the shorter section is to the larger section as the larger section is to the whole; the so-called perfect ration in ancient Greek art and architecture.

High and Low Art: A contested distinction between "fine art" and artifacts made for and used in daily living. Postmodernists collapse the distinction between "high" and "low."

Horizon Line: Where the sky meets the ground in the world or in a perspectival representation of it.

Horizontal Force: An arrangement of elements along a horizontal axis, often expressing peace, restfulness, and stability.

Hue: A name of a color family or an area on the color spectrum.

Implied Line: A series of points that the eye recognizes as a line; a perceived line were areas of contrasting color or texture meet.

Intensity, Saturation, Chroma: The strength or weakness of a color.

Interpretation: A process and result of deciphering what an artifact is about, means, or expresses.

Kinetic Art: Artifacts that are designed to move.

Line: A series of connected points. Lines can be actual or implied. 

Linear Perspective: A system of rendering the appearance of three dimensions on a two-dimensional plane by making objects appear smaller as they receded and by making parallel lines converge in the distance at a vanishing point on a horizon line.

Medium, Media: The material of which an artifact is made; also, an artform, such as painting, sculpture, or product design.

Mixed Media: Different media used in a single work of art.

Monochromatic Color Scheme: Variations in color based on one color.

Negative shape: A shape "left over" from or around a dominant shape.

Neutrals: Blacks, whites, and grays made from mixing black and white. In some media, earth tones are also considered to be neutrals.

Nonrepresentational Art, Nonobjective Art: Artifacts that use colors, textures, shapes, and brushstrokes, for example, to express thoughts and feelings in themselves rather than to make representational artifacts.

Oil Paint: paint that uses linseed oil as a binder for the pigment. Two advantages to working with oil paint are the ability to easily correct (paint over) mistakes and the color does not change during the drying process.

Organic shapes, Biomorphic Shape: A shape that resembles irregular shapes often found in nature. There are 8 basic organic shapes: spirals (spiral fern, whirlpools, and nautilus shells); drops (flower petals, southern Utah rock formations, flower buds, icicles); meanders (rivers as seen from above, sand and water ripples, snakes); branching (leaf veins, trees, elk antlers, lightning); starbursts (cactus spines, kiwi seeds, sea urchins); amoeba (fungus found on trees, coral, water puddles, clouds); helicoids (grape vines, pig tails, tornados, rotini pasta); hexagons* (honeycomb, corn on the cob, crystals).  

*Although one might consider hexagons as a geometric shape, in nature hexagons have imperfections and are consequently asymmetrical.

 Pigment: Ground-up color material, such as powdered minerals, that is suspended in a medium such as oil or acrylic to make paint.

Primary Colors: In a color system, the basic colors that cannot be broken down into other colors and that can be combined to create other colors.

Proximity: The relative distance between elements in an artifact.

Representational Art: Artifacts that render figures, objects, or scenes as they appear in the real or visible world and as they might appear in the imagined world, with varying degrees of accuracy, distortion, and stylization.

Scale: The comparative size of an element of art or object in relation to other elements or objects and expectations about what is normal.

Secondary Colors: The colors created from mixing two primary colors.

Shape: A two-dimensional area with defined or implied boundaries that can be measured by height and width.

Social Context: The time and place in which an artifact is made.

Subject Matter: The representation of people, animals, plants, places, and things depicted in representational art; the shapes, colors, brushstrokes, and other elements in nonrepresentational art.

Symmetry: Mirroring of elements on both sides of a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal dividing line.

Tertiary Colors, Intermediates: The products of mixing a primary and a secondary color.

Three Dimensional: Having height, width, and depth.

Tint: A color that has white added to it.

Tone: A color that has gray added to it.

Unity: The feeling that a composition holds together well visually and is designed to be experienced as a whole.

Value: The relative degree of light or dark; the degree of lightness or darkness in a color.

Vanishing Point: Where converging lines drawn in linear perspective seem to disappear into a distant dot on the horizon line of a three-dimensional scene on a two-dimensional scale.

Vertical Force: An arrangement of elements along a vertical axis, often expressing height, power, and grandeur.

Work of Art: A modernist term that implies a notion of an artifact as singular and unique and the product of isolated genius.

 

Barrett, Terry. Making Art: Form and Meaning. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 2010.