People are often shocked to learn that art making is such a complex process. In this lesson we will take the elements you learned in lesson 2 and put them to work. If you've ever baked a cake, the elements of art are like the eggs and flour and sugar on the counter. Even though you may have all of the ingredients in front of you, it isn't cake until those ingredients are acted upon. The principles of art are similar to the measuring, mixing, pouring, and baking that eventually results in a cake.
All art is composed.
The composition of an artwork is defined in your glossary as the act of organizing the elements into a harmoniously unified whole. It may have occurred to you as you worked on lesson 2 that none of the elements of art operate in isolation. They all exist in relation to one another. The composition of an artwork is the manner in which these many elements are brought together in the work to create a single unit. There are five principles of art that we use to analyze the composition of a work of art.