Mosaic

an image made up of different colored pieces put together.

Usually made of glass or stone, mosaics were popular in ancient Rome.

For example: Vik Muniz made his Self-Portrait and After Van Gogh by pasting many different pieces of paper together

Advertisement

an announcement to the public to make known a certain product or event.

See I Heart Guts and their promotional posters. Each of them is trying to educate the public to certain health issues.

Composition

the result from a placement of elements on one artwork.

When you make sketches, you try out different ways to place everything that you want on your artwork. You place things closer or further in the different planes (foreground, middleground, background), you place them on the left or on the right, etc.

To make dynamic compositions (more exciting pictures), try and use diagonal lines: you can tilt your horizon line a little bit, like if you were a cameraman and you were filming a short with your head a little bit sideways.

Juxtaposition

the overlaying of different elements to create different effects:

• relief
• playing with opacity and color mixing
• complexity of shapes and/or patterns

A collage is a good example of juxtaposition: the putting together of pieces of paper to make an artwork. See works by Derek Gores or Romare Bearden.

Color Scheme

An arrangement of colors that form a theme.

For example: a pastel theme might include some light green, light yellow, light blue, and light purple.

Steinlen's La Tournee du Chat Noir has a "cabaret" theme: yellow, red and black.

Color harmony

a color combination that links all elements together, creating a pleasant, uniform theme.
Colors that are close to each other, for example, the warm colors or the cool colors, make a harmony.

Look at the Salvation Army's poster We See What Most Don't: the harmony includes the different hues of blues, from lights to darks. The only disrupting element is the red Salvation Army logo which provides a contrast.

Color contrast

Color combinations that lead the eye to focus on a specific element of an image.
The usual contrasting colors on the color wheel are:

• yellow and purple
• blue and orange
• green and red
• black and white

Light and dark can also be a way to add contrast to an image. For example, if you walk around on the night of Halloween, the sun is down so it's dark outside, but a few pumpkins will be lit. Your eye will automatically focus on that light coming from the carved pumpkins so we could say that the orange light from the jack-o-lanterns contrasts the dark.

See Unicef's Bad Water poster ad for two good examples of contrast: orange and blue, light and dark.

Post-impressionism

an art movement between 1880 and 1900 that came after impressionism. It pushed the impressionist movement even further by exaggerating colors and the traditional style of composition.

See works by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

Art Nouveau

a style of art and architecture. It focused on thick, organic lines and natural motifs such as flowers, vines, leaves, circles, suns, stars. Soft colors like pink and light brown were important, contrasted with thick black lines.

See works by Alphonse Mucha.

Shape

the space inside a closed line.

For example, a square is a shape because it consists of four lines  (2 parallel sets) that connect at each end, making a closed circuit. The space inside those lines is called the shape.

Shapes can be geometrical, as in straight lines and clear angles, or they can be organic, so wavy and irregular.