Chapter 15 — Elements and Principles of Visual Art and Design

A cook does not invent new ingredients each day; she combines flour, ghee, sugar and water in different amounts. An artist works the same way. Every visual is cooked from a few elements: point, line, shape and form, texture, colour, value and space. Learning their names gives you a vocabulary to talk about any image, and a checklist to use while making your own.

The point is the smallest element, simply a dot. On its own it marks a position. When many points gather, they can build a tone, a pattern or even a whole picture. Look at a rangoli made of dots before the lines are joined, or the dotted borders on a Madhubani painting. A newspaper photograph, seen under a magnifying glass, is also made of tiny dots.

A line is the visible path that joins two points. Lines can be:

• Horizontal - lying flat, they suggest calm and rest, like the horizon at sea.
• Vertical - standing upright, they suggest strength and height, like a temple pillar or a palm tree.
• Diagonal - slanting, they suggest movement and energy, like rain blown by wind.
• Wavy, zig-zag, dashed or curved - each carries its own mood, from flowing water to lightning.

Lines also vary in thickness. A thick, dark line feels bold and near; a thin, light line feels delicate or far away. A single brush can make both, simply by pressing harder or softer. Warli painters of Maharashtra build whole village scenes from points, lines and simple shapes, which shows how far these two elements can take you.

How to practise: fill one page of your sketchbook with ten rows of different lines, each drawn slowly and then quickly. Try pencil, pen and a brush. Next, make a small picture using only dots. Judge your work by asking: Are my lines confident and continuous, or broken by hesitation? Can someone tell calm lines from energetic ones just by looking? Lines drawn from the shoulder, not just the wrist, usually come out smoother.

When a line closes on itself, it encloses an area. That flat, two-dimensional area is a shape. It has length and breadth but no depth. A circle drawn on paper, a triangle of bunting, the outline of a mango leaf - all are shapes.

Shapes come in two families:

• Geometric shapes are regular and measurable: circles, squares, triangles, rectangles, hexagons. You see them in tiles, jaali screens, kites and road signs.
• Organic shapes are irregular and free-flowing, like the shapes of leaves, clouds, puddles, animals and the human body. Nature mostly makes organic shapes.

A form is a three-dimensional shape. It has length, breadth and depth, it occupies real space, and you can walk around it. A ball is the form of a circle; a cube is the form of a square; a cone is the form of a triangle. Forms can also be made by joining many flat shapes, as when six squares of cardboard are folded into a box, or when a kite-maker's flat paper becomes a lantern.

A fine Indian example of form is the Lion Capital of Ashoka from Sarnath, carved in polished sandstone in the Mauryan period, around 250 BCE. Four lions sit back to back on a round drum carved with animals and wheels. The lions are solid forms with rounded chests, curled manes and strong legs. Light and shadow move over their surfaces as you walk around them. Today the same capital appears as the National Emblem on our coins and currency notes, where it is printed as a flat shape - a good reminder of the difference between the two.

In a drawing on flat paper, artists suggest form using shading, which you will practise later. A circle becomes a ball when one side is lighter and the other darker.

How to practise: pick five objects at home, such as a lota, a matchbox, an onion, a cricket ball and a bangle. For each, first draw its outline as a flat shape. Then name the basic form hidden inside it - sphere, cube, cylinder, cone. Check yourself: Can you see that a glass is a cylinder and a funnel is a cone? Spotting the basic form first makes every drawing easier.

Texture is the surface quality of a thing - how it feels, or how it looks as if it would feel. Run your fingers over a jute sack, a silk dupatta, a coconut shell, a polished marble floor and the bark of a neem tree. Each feels different: rough, smooth, grainy, silky, prickly, bumpy, soft.

Artists work with two kinds of texture:

• Physical (actual) texture can be sensed by touching. A clay pot with fingernail marks, an embroidered cushion, a carved wooden door and thick oil paint laid on with a knife all have real, touchable texture.
• Visual (implied) texture is only seen, not felt. A drawing of a tiger looks furry, but the paper is smooth. The artist creates the illusion through patterns of lines and dots: short curved strokes for fur, crossed lines for woven cloth, scattered dots for sand.

Indian crafts are full of texture. A Thanjavur-style plate is worked in raised metal, so its patterns stand up from the surface and catch the light. Kantha embroidery from Bengal covers cloth with rows of tiny running stitches that create a gentle rippled surface. Terracotta horses from Bankura have stamped and incised patterns. Even a simple wall painted with mud and cow dung has a soft, uneven texture that changes how colour sits on it.

Texture matters because it tells us about material. In a picture, smooth texture can suggest glass or water, rough texture can suggest stone or old wood. Changing texture between parts also helps the eye tell one object from another.

How to practise - a texture rubbing: place a thin sheet of paper over a rough surface such as a coin, a leaf, a brick, a grater or a woven mat. Rub over it with the side of a crayon or a soft pencil. The texture appears on the paper. Collect eight rubbings and label each. Then try to draw the same textures by hand, without rubbing, using only lines and dots. Judge your work: If you showed the hand-drawn version to a friend, could they guess the material? That is the test of good visual texture.

Colour is visible because of light. When light falls on a mango, the skin reflects mostly yellow and orange light into our eyes and absorbs the rest; our eyes and brain read this as the colour of the mango. In a dark room, there is no light to reflect, so we see no colour at all.

The colours an artist uses come from pigments and dyes. They can be:

• Natural - taken from earth, minerals, plants and animals. Indian painters used red and yellow ochre from soil, white from lime or chalk, black from lamp soot, blue from indigo, yellow from turmeric and red from lac or the madder root. The Ajanta murals were painted with such earth and mineral colours.
• Synthetic - manufactured in factories, like most poster colours, crayons and acrylics used today. They are bright, uniform and easy to buy.

India has thought carefully about colour for a very long time. An ancient treatise on painting, the Chitrasutra of the Vishnudharmottara Purana, names the root colours:

mūlaraṅgāḥ smṛtāḥ pañca śvetaḥ pīto vilohitaḥ |
nīlaḥ kṛṣṇaśca rājendra śataśo'nyatarāḥ ||

In simple words: the root colours are said to be five - white, yellow, red, blue and black - and from them, O king, hundreds of others are made. The text goes on to say that by mixing earlier colours, using imagination and good judgement, a painter can make hundreds and even thousands of colours. This is the same idea you use when you mix blue and yellow to get green, or red and white to get pink.

Colours also carry feelings and meanings. Reds, oranges and yellows are called warm and feel lively; blues, greens and violets are called cool and feel calm. In India, saffron, red and turmeric yellow are linked with festivals and auspicious occasions.

How to practise: make a colour chart. Start with your basic colours and mix them two at a time in small boxes, noting the recipe under each. If possible, make one natural colour - for example, crushed spinach for green or boiled beetroot for magenta - and compare it with the bottled one. Check yourself: Can you mix a colour that matches a leaf you have picked? Matching real objects trains the eye.

Value, also called tone, is how light or dark a colour is. A sky at noon and the same sky at dusk may both be blue, but their values are very different. Value is what makes objects look solid and gives a picture depth and mood.

You can change the value of a colour in two simple ways:

• Tint - adding white makes a colour lighter. Red with white becomes pink; blue with white becomes sky blue.
• Shade - adding black makes a colour darker. Red with a little black becomes maroon; green with black becomes a deep bottle green.

When a colour changes step by step from light to dark, we get a gradation. A row of boxes running from almost white, through the pure colour, to almost black is called a value scale. Painters keep such a scale in mind when they look at any object.

Why does gradation matter? Light usually falls on an object from one side. The side facing the light is lightest - this brightest spot is the highlight. The side turned away is darker - the shadow. Between them the tone changes smoothly. When you paint a ball with this smooth change, it stops looking like a flat disc and starts looking round. The Bodhisattva painted on the walls of Ajanta Cave 1 shows this beautifully: the face and arms are painted with gentle darker tones at the edges and lighter tones at the centre, so the figure seems to swell out from the wall even though it is painted on flat rock.

Value also sets mood. A picture made mostly of light tones feels airy and happy; one with many dark tones feels serious or mysterious. Strong contrast between very light and very dark grabs attention.

How to practise: draw a strip of seven boxes. Leave the first white, fill the middle with pure colour, and the last nearly black; fill the boxes between with tints and shades so each step is equal. Do the same in pencil by pressing lightly to heavily. Judge yourself: Is any jump between two boxes much bigger than the others? Even steps show good control.

Space is the area in which all the other elements are arranged. On a sheet of paper it is the whole surface; in a sculpture or a room it is the real air around and between things. How an artist divides space decides whether a picture feels crowded, empty, calm or exciting.

Space is divided into two kinds:

• Positive space - the area occupied by the main subjects, such as the figure, the pot or the tree.
• Negative space - the empty area around and between the subjects. It is not truly empty: it has its own shapes. Look at the gap between a cup and its handle, or the sky between the branches of a tree.

Good artists design both. A famous puzzle picture shows a white vase which, looked at differently, becomes two dark faces in profile - positive and negative space swapping places. In Indian jaali work, the stone is the positive space and the holes are the negative space; the holes are just as carefully designed.

Pictures also create an illusion of depth by dividing space into layers:

• Foreground - nearest to the viewer, usually lower in the picture and shown larger.
• Middle ground - the layer in between.
• Background - furthest away, usually higher in the picture, smaller and less detailed.

In the Ajanta Bodhisattva mural, the large princely figure stands in front, while smaller figures, animals and architecture crowd behind, so we read the scene in layers. Overlapping is a simple trick: whatever covers part of something else looks nearer.

How to practise: place a chair in front of a window and draw only the negative spaces - the gaps between its legs and rungs - as dark shapes. Surprisingly, the chair appears. Then draw a simple street scene with one thing clearly in the foreground, one in the middle and one in the background. Check yourself: Is the nearest object largest and lowest? Do overlaps make the order clear? Have you left some breathing space instead of filling every corner?

Once you know the elements, every artwork becomes something you can read. Begin with the art of everyday life. Mandana paintings, made on the mud walls and floors of homes in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, are drawn in white lime or chalk on a red-brown ground. They use bold lines and geometric shapes - squares, triangles, zig-zags - repeated to form borders and medallions. A metal plate in the Thanjavur style is rich in curving lines and raised physical texture, and its gleam of brass, copper and silver adds colour and value. An embroidered tapestry may combine organic shapes of birds and flowers, bright thread colours and the touchable texture of stitches.

Modern Indian artists studied these traditions and experimented with the same elements in new ways:

• Jamini Roy (1887-1972), from Bengal, turned away from European-style realism and borrowed the bold outlines of Kalighat paintings, terracotta temple panels and village crafts. In works such as Mother and Child, done in tempera, he uses thick, flowing curved lines, flat areas of a few earthy colours and large almond eyes. Line and shape do most of the work; there is very little shading.
• S. H. Raza (1922-2016), born in Madhya Pradesh, built many paintings and prints around the bindu - the point or dot, which in Indian thought is the seed from which everything grows. His works use circles, triangles, bands of strong colour and the memory of the forests of his childhood.
• Meera Mukherjee (1923-1998) learned from the Dhokra metal casters of Bastar and Bengal and made bronze sculptures of workers and everyday life. Her forms are built from coiled wax threads, so their surfaces carry a strong ribbed texture.

How to read an artwork: look for one minute without speaking. Then list the elements you notice, starting with the strongest. Ask: What kind of lines? Geometric or organic shapes? Flat or shaded? Real or visual texture? Which colours, and what values? How is space used? Write a sentence on each. Different viewers may notice different things - that is fine, as long as you can point to what you see.

Keep a visual journal: for one week, sketch a few things each day - a leaf, a door latch, a sari border, a grille - and note the elements beside each sketch. Share the pages with friends and compare what each of you noticed.

Knowing the elements is like knowing the ingredients. But a dish tastes good only when ingredients are combined in the right proportion and cooked at the right heat. Indian thinkers asked the same question about art: what makes a picture truly good? Their answer was Shadanga - the six limbs (shad = six, anga = limb) of painting. Indian tradition connects this idea with the early writing on painting found in texts such as the Chitrasutra of the Vishnudharmottara Purana, and it is summed up in a well-known Sanskrit verse:

rūpabhedāḥ pramāṇāni bhāva-lāvaṇya-yojanam |
sādṛśyaṁ varṇikābhaṅga iti citraṁ ṣaḍaṅgakam ||

The six limbs, in simple words, are:

Notice how complete this list is. The first two are about seeing and measuring; the third is about feeling; the fourth is about arrangement; the fifth is about likeness; and the sixth is about craft. A painting that is perfectly measured but has no feeling fails Bhava. A painting full of emotion but clumsily coloured fails Varnikabhanga. In the twentieth century, Abanindranath Tagore wrote about the Shadanga and encouraged artists of the Bengal School to use it again.

How to use it: the Shadanga makes an excellent self-check after you finish a drawing. Go through the six limbs one by one and give yourself a mark out of five for each. Where is your weakest limb? Proportion? Expression? Choose that one to improve in your next work. You can also use it to discuss a friend's work kindly: start with the strongest limb, then suggest one to work on.

The elements are what an artwork is made of. The principles of design are how they are arranged. Well-composed pictures communicate clearly because they follow these principles, whether the artist thinks of them consciously or not. Let us read them in Jamini Roy's Mother and Child, where a mother stands holding her baby and a flower.

1. Unity and harmony. A picture has unity when all its parts feel as if they belong together. Harmony comes from repeating related colours, similar lines or a common style. In the painting, a few earthy colours - ochre, red, green, black and white - appear again and again across the figures and background, and the same thick curving line is used everywhere. Nothing looks borrowed from another picture.

2. Balance. Balance gives a sense of visual stability, as on a see-saw.

• Symmetrical balance - both halves are nearly mirror images, as in the front view of the Taj Mahal or a rangoli.
• Asymmetrical balance - the halves differ, but they feel equal in weight; a large object on one side is balanced by several small ones, or by a bright colour, on the other.

The mother stands in the graceful tribhanga pose, bent at three points - neck, waist and knee - like many Indian sculptures. Her body sways one way and the child sits on the opposite side, so the figure feels balanced.

3. Rhythm and movement. Rhythm is created when an element repeats with a regular beat, as a pattern of beads or the folds of a sari. Movement is the path our eyes travel through a picture. In the painting, the long curving stem of the plant and the repeated lines on the mother's clothes lead the eye up and down the figure, just as a beat leads a dancer.

How to practise: take one artwork and draw a quick thumbnail showing only its main shapes. Draw a vertical line down the middle and ask whether the two halves feel equal. Trace with your finger the path your eye follows. Then check unity: Is there any colour or line that does not belong? Removing or repeating it often fixes the problem.

The second group of principles decides what the viewer notices first and how the parts relate in size and importance.

4. Emphasis. Emphasis is created by making one element stand out so that it becomes the focus. You can do this with a contrasting colour, a sharper line, a larger size, a strong texture, or by isolating the object in empty space. In Jamini Roy's Mother and Child, the mother's palm, coloured differently and holding a flower, catches our attention. In Jyoti Bhatt's etching Devi, a red bindi on the forehead stands out against a mostly black-and-white image, so our eye goes straight to it.

5. Proportion. Proportion is the relationship between the sizes of different parts - of one part to another and of each part to the whole. Correct proportion makes things believable: a child's head is large compared to its body; an adult's is smaller. Artists can also change proportion deliberately to express an idea. In the painting, the baby is small beside the large mother, which expresses care and protection. In many Indian sculptures, a deity is shown larger than the attendants to show power.

6. Hierarchy. Hierarchy is the order of importance in a visual - what is seen first, second and third. It is built by combining size, position, colour and detail. In Mother and Child, the mother takes up the most space and is seen first; next the child; then the plant and background details. In a newspaper, the headline is biggest, then the sub-heading, then the body text - the same principle at work.

These six principles work together. Emphasis without balance can make a picture feel lopsided; strong rhythm without a focus can feel like wallpaper. A good habit is to decide one main focus before you start.

How to practise - analyse two artworks: choose two images, for example a Gupta-period terracotta of the river goddess Ganga and a modern print or poster. For each, write two principles you can see and point to the exact part that shows them. A friend may choose different principles; both can be right if you can show your evidence.