Brushlines

Brushlines has two games. In Identify you play 5 rounds. Each round shows a picture drawn in the manner of one of 18 art movements, from Romanticism to Op Art, and four names to choose from. In Timeline you put 5 movements in order by date, earliest first.

• Identify: each round is worth 200 points. Clue reveals one of the movement's four traits, then a key date, and takes 30 points off the round each time. A wrong pick scores 0 for that round.
• After each round the answer is shown with all its clues and a link to read about the movement; after round 5 you see all five and your score out of 1,000.
• Timeline: drag the movements, or use the ▲▼ buttons, then press Check order. Every two movements in a set are at least 5 years apart. Each neighbouring pair in the right order scores 200, and a perfect order adds 200, for 1,000 in all.
• After checking, each movement shows its key date and what that date is (for example, when it was founded, or when its name first appears) with a link to read more.

A round shows a sunburst of gold and green rays behind a stepped, ziggurat-like shape, with gold zigzags below. If you know that look, pick Art Deco at once for the full 200. Not sure? Buy one clue, "symmetry and geometric forms", and the round is worth 170; a second, "stepped, ziggurat-like motifs", makes it 140. Picking wrong at any point scores 0, so guessing blind among four names is worth only 50 on average.

In Timeline, suppose you get Surrealism, Futurism, De Stijl, Op Art and Pop Art. The order is Futurism (founded in Milan in 1909), De Stijl (founded in 1917), Surrealism (officially established in 1924), Pop Art (the name was in use by 1955) and Op Art (the name dates from 1964).

• Daily: the same Identify game and the same Timeline for everyone each day (the day changes at midnight UTC). Only your first Daily of each game per day counts on the leaderboard; it counts as played from your first clue, pick or move.
• Practice: a new random game each time, or press New. Practice games are not on the leaderboard.

• Desktop: click Clue, then click a name; click Next round to go on. In Timeline, drag a movement or click its ▲▼ buttons, then click Check order.
• Phone & tablet: tap Clue and the names; in Timeline tap the ▲▼ buttons (dragging also works).

• Look at the method, not just the colours: a few flat shapes floating on white, a grid of black lines, tiny dots, poured skeins of paint and wavy black-and-white stripes each point to a different movement.
• If two names fit, one clue usually separates them: Cubism and Futurism both break forms into planes, but only Futurism is about speed and motion.
• Spend clues only when you are torn between names: a clue costs 30, a wrong answer costs the whole round.
• In Timeline, place the ones you know first (Romanticism and Impressionism are 19th-century, Pop Art and Op Art post-war), then fit the rest between them.

Brushlines teaches the visual signatures of 18 major movements in Western art, the ideas behind them, and roughly when each appeared.

• Skills: art history, art movements, visual analysis, chronology
• Best for: roughly grades 6–12 (ages 11+)
• For parents & teachers: every answer links to the movement's encyclopedia article, so a round makes a natural starting point for looking at real paintings from that movement.

An art movement is a tendency or style in art with a specific philosophy or goal, followed by a group of artists during a specific period. Movements have been explained by the artists themselves, sometimes in a manifesto, and sometimes by critics; because so many names end in -ism, they are sometimes called isms (art movement).

Several names began as criticism. Impressionism took its name from Claude Monet's Impression, Sunrise after Louis Leroy's 1874 article mocked the painting as at most a sketch (Impressionism). At the Salon d'Automne of 1905 the critic Louis Vauxcelles called Henri Matisse and the painters around him fauves, wild beasts, and the name Fauvism stuck (Fauvism: Salon d'Automne 1905).

The pictures in Brushlines are original images generated by the game, not copies of real works. Each is drawn to show its movement's documented features, such as the Ben-Day dots of Pop Art (Pop art: United States), De Stijl's straight horizontal and vertical lines and primary colours (De Stijl: principles and influences), and the whiplash lines of Art Nouveau (Art Nouveau). Every clue and date in the game comes from the movement's encyclopedia article, which is linked after each round.

Brushlines is an original PlayPendium game. Its pictures are generated in the browser from a seed, so the Daily is the same for everyone. It needs no install or account.

A free, original browser game on PlayPendium. No download, no install.