Art Terminology: Value, Color, and Techniques
- Objective: That which is based on physical actuality; tending to appear natural or real.
- Subjective: That which is derived from the mind, reflecting a personal viewpoint, bias, or emotion.
- Mass: A shape that appears to stand out three-dimensionally from the space surrounding it or that appears to be a solid body of material.
- Volume: A measurable area of defined or occupied space.
- Decorative Value: Value stressing the essential flatness of a surface.
- Local Value: The relative lightness or darkness of a surface.
- Plastic Value: Value used to create the illusion of volume and space.
- Atmospheric Perspective: The illusion of depth produced in graphic works by lightening values, softening details and textures, reducing value contrasts, and neutralizing colors in objects as they recede.
- High-Key Value: A value that has a level of middle gray or lighter.
- Low-Key Value: Any value that has a level of middle gray or darker.
- Closed-Value Composition: Composition in which values are limited by the boundaries of their shape.
- Open-Value Composition: Composition in which values cross over shape boundaries.
- Value Pattern: The arrangement of values that control movement and create a unifying effect throughout a work of art.
- Shallow Space: The illusion of limited depth.
- Modeling
- Chiaroscuro: Distribution of light and dark in a picture.
- Sfumato: The technique of allowing tones and colors to shade gradually into one another.
- Tenebrism: A technique of painting that exaggerates or emphasizes the effects of Chiaroscuro. Larger amounts of dark value are placed close to smaller areas of highly contrasting lights – which change suddenly – in order to concentrate attention on important features.
- Accent: Any emphasis given to elements of a composition that makes them attract more attention than the other features around them.
- Paint Quality: The textural character of applied paint.
- Papier Collé: Technique in which scraps of paper are pasted to the picture surface.
- Trompe l’oeil: A painting technique that copies nature and it is mistaken for the real thing. “Deceives the eye”.
- Assemblage: A technique that combines actual items in a display.
- Collage: A technique in which real materials are attached on a picture plane surface, often in combination with painted or drawn passages.
- Tactile: A quality that refers to the sense of touch.
- Additive Color: Color created by superimposing light rays. The three primary colors of light (red + blue + green = white).
- Subtractive Color: Color that is produced when waves of light are reflected back after all other wavelengths have been absorbed.
- Spectrum: The band of individual colors that results when a beam of white light is broken into its different wavelengths.
- Achromatic: Relating to differences of light and dark; the absence of hue and its intensity.
- Chromatic: Pertaining to the presence of color.
- Hue: The common name of a color and indicates its position in the spectrum or color wheel.
- Color Value (High and Low Key)
(High: Any color that has a value level of middle gray or lighter).
(Low: Any color that has a value level of middle gray or darker.)
- Intensity: The saturation, strength, or purity of a hue.
- Pigments and Dyes: Color substances that give their color property to another material by being mixed with it or covering it.
- Warm and Cool Colors
(Warm: Happy, joyful – red, orange, yellow).
(Cool: Calm, soothe – blue, green, light purple).
- Value: The relative degree of light or dark.