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Students > Expressionism > Lesson 1 > Analysis

Analysis
How is it arranged or designed?

ANALYSIS questions should be asked about any artwork, including the one you choose for your assignment.

Artists make relationships--they repeat lines, shapes, colors, and patterns in exciting ways to make an artwork more unified and interesting. This is called composition. (Check out composition at http://artlex.com and Compositional Models)


How are the shapes arranged, what is the composition of the artwork? Do the shapes resemble any of the following shapes?

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compositions


What are the major colors?

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(This is the hue name of the color. Check out color at http://www2.evansville.edu/studiochalkboard/paint.html )

Are the colors predominantly light or dark or both?

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(This is color value.)

Are they bright or dull or both?

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(This is the intensity of the colors.)

What color harmony is used: monochromatic, analogous, complementary?

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(Use a color wheel to help you. See http://www.colormatters.com/colortheory.html or http://www2.evansville.edu/studiochalkboard/paint.html)

How is the value or lighting? Is shading used? Shading means showing a variety of tones or grays, even in the colors. For instance, the lightness of red is pink and the darkness is maroon. Are there just lines in this painting? Or is there light shading, a deep illusion of depth, or high contrast with no shading?

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How is the space arranged? Is it flat with no depth? Is there an overlapping of shapes or is there a sense of three dimensions with some shading and shadows, and showing sides, or deep perspective. Find the foreground, middle ground, background.

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(Check out http://artlex.com for these terms. Also look up perspective; it may help.)