Artistic describes someone with natural talent or skill in creating beautiful or meaningful things, or something that shows creativity and imagination. An artistic person might excel at painting, music, writing, dance, or any form of creative expression. When you arrange flowers in a vase with care for color and balance, you're being artistic. When a chef plates a meal so beautifully that it looks like a painting, that's artistic presentation.

The word also describes things that show the qualities of art: beauty, creativity, and thoughtful design. An artistic photograph captures a mood or tells a story through its composition, lighting, and subject. An artistic performance moves people emotionally through the performer's creative interpretation and expression.

Being artistic isn't limited to traditional arts like painting or sculpture. A skateboarder inventing a new trick can be artistic. A programmer designing an elegant solution to a problem shows artistic thinking. Scientists sometimes make artistic breakthroughs when they imagine creative new ways to solve problems.

Many great scientists, engineers, and mathematicians are deeply artistic in how they approach problems. The architect Frank Lloyd Wright combined artistic vision with practical engineering.