C

Chalk is a soft powdery white or off-white writing or drawing material in crayon form, generally used on a blackboard or other dark surface.

Charcoal is a black crumbly drawing material made of carbon and often used for sketching and under-drawing for paintings, although can also be used to create more finished drawings.

Chiaroscuro (pronounced: key-ara-skoo-row) is an Italian term which translates as light-dark, and refers to the balance and pattern of light and shade in a painting or drawing.

Collage describes both the technique and the resulting work of art in which pieces of paper, photographs, fabric and other ephemera are arranged and stuck down onto a supporting surface.

Colour is one of the seven elements of art. The perceived hue of an object, produced by the manner in which it reflects or emits light into the eye. Also, a substance, such as a dye, pigment, or paint, that imparts a hue.

Complementary colours are pairs of colours that contrast with each other more than any other colour, and when placed side-by-side make each other look brighter.

Composition is the arrangement of elements within a work of art.

Conceptual art is art for which the idea (or concept) behind the work is more important than the finished art object. It emerged as an art movement in the 1960s and the term usually refers to art made from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s.

The term contemporary art is loosely used to refer to art of the present day and of the relatively recent past, of an innovatory or avant-garde nature.

Cubism was a revolutionary new approach to representing reality invented in around 1907–08 by artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. They brought different views of subjects (usually objects or figures) together in the same picture, resulting in paintings that appear fragmented and abstracted.