composition - The plan, placement or arrangement of the elements of art in a work. It is often useful to discuss these in reference to the principles of design, as well as to the relative weight of the composition's parts.

Composition can also refer to the area of a sheet in which the design appears in a drawing or print. When a composition is limited to a distinct area of a plate or a sheet of paper, it is good practice to note the composition's measurements, as well as the measurements of the plate and of the overall sheet.

The design of a composition should either be pleasing or it should be in some other way expressive.

The term has also come to refer to any work of art, because any work's composition is so essential to it.

• "Chalkboard" on drawing techniques. It has an excellent page on general compositional layout on which the four types of composition in the above graphic are explained. Chalkboard is produced by Ralph Larmann, an art faculty member at the University of Evansville, IN.

• Threecolor.com is "a testbed for technical and aesthetic experiments." This site presents several "temporal compositions," each a brief multimedia production.

Also see abecedarian, chiastic, concatenation, eurythmy, focal point, horror vacui, invert, music, order, pasteup, periodicity, rhythm, sequence, taxis, and taxonomy.

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