Line, Shape and Form in Art

In this lesson you will learn about three basic art concepts – line, shape and form.

Tip – The video below teaches you the basic concept PLUS a practical demonstration where I show you how to create beautiful abstracts using shapes.

Line, shape and form are three progressive concepts.

It all starts with a line which is simply that – a line.

Line, shape and form are three progressive concepts.

It all starts with a line which is simply that – a line.

A line is a mark that connects two points and can vary in thickness, length, direction, and texture.

As it only has length we call it a one dimensional object.

Traditionally you would think of a line as being straight, but it can change direction as well.

We can create artworks using only lines:

Examples of Art Using Lines

Probably the most famous example of an artwork that uses lines is the swirling landscape Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh.

Progressing from that, if we make the start and end point of the line meet, we end up with a shape.

There are many many shapes. I am sure you can name at least 10 off the top of your head. Classic ones are the circle, square, triangle and rectangle.

More fancy ones would be shapes like a parallelogram, heart, plus shape and a diamond shape.

These are all called regular shapes and tend to be symmetrical or at least appear symmetrical.

You can however also make random shapes like these:

These are called organic shapes.

As with lines, you can create artworks entirely out of shapes.

A popular art form using this technique is the creation of mandalas

and dot art

Here is one of Henri Matisee’s shape paintings called The Sorrows of the King:

At first thought you would expect that artworks made from shapes alone are going to be very basic artworks.

As you can see from the examples above however you can create incredibly detailed and interesting paintings using only shapes.

A great way to get started with painting using shapes is to take an object and break it down into it’s basic shapes then fill each shape with a different color.

Building on from that you can create a scene using a variety of objects. Only sketch the outline from each object onto the canvas. This will give you a variety of shapes, then paint each shape a different color. You can see how effecive this is from the Matisse painting above.

In order to take our artwork to the next level we need to add the third dimension – depth to the artwork.

When you do this your artwork is said to have form.

The true way to create an artwork with form is like this:

or like this:

In other words an actual three dimensional artwork like a sculpture.

Unfortunately when it comes to painting, we are working on a flat surface so adding a true third dimension isn’t possible so we will have to simulate our third dimension.

We are going to do this by adding colour, contrast, textures and shading onto the canvas.

So our two dimensional artwork will go from this:

to this using shading:

and from this:

to this using texture:

and from this:

to this using colour and shading:

There are also other things we can do to create the illusion of form on the canvas.

Let’s use this landscape painting as an example:

1) We have used light and shadow to create the illusion of depth and dimension in the cliffs.

2) We have used cast shadows to make the trees and bushes appear as though they have height off the ground.

3) We have used atmospheris and linear perspective to create the illusion that there is depth in the scene by painting the distant objects smaller and lighter.

4) We have painted objects overlapping each other, like the tree over the cactus, to create the illusion of distance between them.

I want us to use this knowledge to create an actual artwork. I quite like the abstract and semi abstract examples of Picasso and Matisse, so let’s create our own abstract painting.

We’ll start off by taking a look at a few ways we can add variety to our lines, shapes and forms in order to create interesting abstracts.

The simplest method is to vary the thickness of your lines to create artworks like these:

We can also play around with line directions to form repeating patterns like this:

Here is a classic example of how Piet Mondrian used line and colour to create his famous modern abstracts:

You can take this even further by adding texture to the mix as you can see here:

To get ideas on how to add texture to your paintings you can follow our tutorial on 20 Ways to Add Texture To Your Paintings

The big question I always get when discussing abstract painting is:

My answer to this is simple:

I want to show you just one of the ways for you to visualise your abstracts so that you can see that imagination is a skill that can be learnt.

This method is not only surprisingly simple, but has been used by some of the best abstract artists of all time.

What you do is take what is around you and reduce it to abstract lines, shapes and forms.

Take a look at these trees:

They seem incredibly complex and certainly not the inspiration for an abstract painting.

Now let’s have a look at an abstract painting that Piet Mondrian did of a similar tree:

Can you see how he looked at and painted the shapes formed by the gaps between the branches instead of painting the actual branches.

This left him with a beautiful abstract that is alive with movement.

Here is one of my local scenes of a dormant volcano, Rangitoto Island.

In order to turn this scene into an abstract I have broken the scene into shapes of colour like this:

The random shapes in the sky and water represent the setting sun and the rolling waves.

The directions of the lines in between the shapes draw your eye towards the focal point – the island in the distance.

This artwork could be taken further by adding texture into each block of colour.

In the next example I have taken this photo of citrus fruit slices:

and used it as inspiration to create this abstract:

If you look at the painting and compare it to the reference photo you will see that the large rings roughly correspond to the position of fruit slices in the reference photo.

I have then used the colour of the fruit throughout the painting.

Texture and lines were added to the large rings in order to add lines and form to the artwork.

The repeating rings are the shapes and there are also more lines in the black background areas.

As you can see I have used lines, shapes and form along with the shapes in my reference photo in order to create an abstract that is inspired by the photo, but looks nothing like it.

To see how I painted this artwork, watch the video at the top of the page.

If you enjoyed this tutorial then you will love the one about Creating Art Using Patterns.