MarkElements are the basic building blocks of any artform. All art can be broken down into its elements or component parts. However, it is important to remember that in any successful work of art, the elements work together.
The Arts combine a wide variety of different techniques, methods and mediums. The different types of art share elements but some have unique elements. For example, music has the elements of actual sound and time that can only be suggested in a painting.
The Visual Arts include: Sculpture, Drawing, Painting, Photography, Printmaking, Collage and any combinationa. The visual arts are usually static. That means they don't move by themselves. The artist makes a painting and then hangs it on the wall. The painting might have lines that imply action, but they don't move. We can spend as much time as we like with static art. We can view it for five seconds in a gallery or we can purchase a print, hang it on our wall, and look at it for hours on end. Static art does not have the elements of sound, motion and time.
Theater and Film Making combine sound, motion and time with the visual art elements to usually tell a story. It is rare that a movie or theater production does not have a story, however, a newer artform, the performance piece, will often work with just an idea.
Music lacks the visual elements but uses sound and time. The visual elements can only be suggested. Dance combines the elements of music with motion. It can also use the visual elements such as shape, line, color and form.
Photography lacks the elements of line, shape or texture. It has mark, because it uses a process that when viewed under a magnifier reveals dots called grain. Photography has value, light and dark, color and form. Line, shape and texture can only be phographed or implied because the viewer sees them. The camera only "sees" light and dark and records it as a point. Special high contrast films used by printers, called lith films, record the shape made by light. Points must be added with specialized screens. They cannot record form.
Filmmaking uses the visual elements. If you look at the individual frame it has most or all the elements of a painting, photograph or drawing. Because they are in motion and because we are distracted by the story, we tend not to look closely at the individual elements that create the image. We look at the picture and not into the picture. To look into the picture you need to "freeze the frame."
Mark
Line
Shape
Form
Value
Color
Texture
Space