Art Techniques

Painting - Works of art made with paint on a surface. Often, the surface, also called a support, is either a tightly stretched piece of canvas or a panel. How the ground (on which paint is applied) is prepared on the support depends greatly on the type of paint to be used. Paintings are usually intended to be placed in frames, and exhibited on walls, but there have been plenty of exceptions. Also, the act of painting, which may involve a wide range of techniques and materials, along with the artist's other concerns which effect the content of a work.


Drawing - Depiction of shapes and forms on a surface chiefly by means of lines. Color and shading may be included. Drawing is the basis of all pictorial representation, a major fine art technique in itself, and an early step in most art activities. Though an integral part of most painting, drawing is generally differentiated from painting by the dominance of line over mass.  The artist's choices of drawing media — tools and surface — tend to determine whether a drawing will be more or less linear or painterly in quality.  There are many sorts of drawing techniques, varying according to the effect the artist wants, and depending on whether the drawing is an end in itself — an independent and finished work of art -- or a preliminary to some other medium or form — although distinct from the final product, such drawings also have intrinsic artistic value. Preliminary drawings include various exercises (e.g., contour drawing, gesture drawing, figure drawing, drawing from the flat), as well as sketches and studies, cartoons and underdrawings.


Sculpture - A three-dimensional work of art, or the art of making it. Such works may be carved, modeled, constructed, or cast. Sculptures can also be described as assemblage, in the round, and relief, and made in a huge variety of media.


Photography - The art, craft, and science of producing permanent images of objects on light-sensitive surfaces.  Louis Daguerre (French, 1787-1851) developed the first permanent photographic images in 1839, having continued the pioneering work of Joseph Niepce. Daguerre's process is called the daguerreotype.


Mosaic - A picture or design made of tiny pieces (called tesserae) of colored stone, glass, tile or paper adhered to a surface. It is typically decorative work for walls, vaults, ceilings or floors, the tesserae set in plaster or concrete.


This technique was used by the Romans in regularly shaped pieces of marble in its natural colors to decorate their villas. It was later adopted by Byzantine artists using pieces of glass with irregular surfaces to tell the Christian story on the walls of their churches.  Mosaics are among the ten classes of patterns.


Printmaking - A print is a shape or mark made from a block or plate or other object that is covered with wet color (usually ink) and then pressed onto a flat surface, such as paper or textile. Most prints can be produced over and over again by re-inking the printing block or plate. Printmaking can be done in many ways, including using an engraved block or stone, transfer paper, or a film negative. The making of fine prints is generally included in the graphic arts, while the work of artists whose designs are made to satisfy the needs of more commercial clients are included in graphic design.


Collage - A picture or design created by adhering such basically flat elements as newspaper, wallpaper, printed text and illustrations, photographs, cloth, string, etc., to a flat surface, when the result becomes three-dimensional, and might also be called a relief sculpture / construction / assemblage. Most of the elements adhered in producing most collages are "found" materials. Introduced by the Cubist artists, this process was widely used by artists who followed, and is a familiar technique in contemporary art.  "Collage" was originally a French word, derived from the word coller, meaning "to paste." 


Montage - A single pictorial composition made by juxtaposing or overlapping many pictures or designs. The art or process of making such a composition. Also, a rapid succession of different images or shots in a movie.


Basketry, and basketwork - A basket is a woven container made of such tough and bendable materials as twigs or strips (veneer) of wood, cane, rattan, reed, rush, wire, or plastic, often with a handle or handles; or something that resembles a basket, especially in shape or function.


Baskets are usually lightweight. Among the most commonly used basketry techniques are plaiting, twining, coiling, and imbrication. Basketry is the art or craft of making baskets, or objects woven like baskets, and is one of the oldest and most universal of crafts, practised among even the most primitive of peoples. It may be that basketry preceded the development of both textiles and fired pottery. Many baskets produced in Europe have, by long tradition, been produced using the rod-like twigs, harvested from willow trees (osier). Much furniture employing basketry techniques has been made using cane, rattan and rush.


Ceramics or ceramic ware—Pottery or hollow clay sculptures fired at high temperatures in a kiln or oven to make them harder and stronger. Types include earthenware, porcelain, stoneware, and terra cotta. The following are examples, along with their definitions.


Genre and genres

Genre painting depicts subjects and scenes from everyday life, ordinary folk, and common activities. It achieved its greatest popularity in seventeenth-century Holland (the Netherlands) with the works of Jan Steen (1626-1679) and Jan Vermeer (1632-1675).


When used in the plural form, genres are the various categories of subject matter in the traditional academic hierarchy, in descending order of importance: history, megalography, mythology, religion, portraiture, genre (see the first sense above), landscape, still life, rhopography, and vernacular. 


Medium/Media

Medium (plural is media)- The material or technique used by an artist to produce a work of art. Medium can also refer to what carries a paint's pigments, and is also called a vehicle or a base. The medium is what determines what kind of paint is produced. A painter can mix a medium with its solvents, pigments and other substances in order to make paint and control its consistency. A variety of mediums are available that provide a matte, semi-gloss, or glossy finish.


Types of Support

Support - The material providing a surface upon which an artist applies color, collage, etc. Also, holding up, as a base or column often does.



Methods of Painting

Pointillism: A method of painting developed in France in the 1880s in which tiny dots of color are applied to the canvas. When viewed from a distance, the points of color appear to blend together to make other colors and to form shapes and outlines. Georges Seurat (French, 1859-1891) was its leading exponent. His most famous painting is A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884-1886, oil on canvas, 81 x 120 inches, Art Institute of Chicago. Occasionally used synonyms for pointillism have been "divisionism" and "confetti-ism." 


Feathering: In drawing and painting, to feather is to blend an edge so that it fades off or softens. To feather is also to overlap values and colors in the manner of a bird's overlapping feathers.


Divisionism: A system of painting in small dots of color placed in relation to each other based on certain color theories.


Art Tools

Brush: A tool used to apply paints and inks to a surface, consisting of hairs, or bristles held in place by a ferrule attached to a handle. The hair may be from any of several sources, some of which are badger, ox, fitch, squirrel (called "camel hair"), and synthetics, though perhaps the finest is red sable. Bristles are usually from hogs, bristle brushes having a characteristic taper, or curve. Brushes for acrylic and polymer paints generally have nylon bristles compatible with those paints.


Brayer: A tool used to roll ink onto a surface by hand, usually in block printing and in monoprinting.


Easel: A tool allowing the stable support and display of a painter's canvas or panel. Sturdier easels typically involve a blocky and heavy structure, while portable easels are light-weight and three-legged. Most contemporary easels can be folded for storage.


Eraser: A tool used in the erasure of parts of drawings. Graphite pencil drawings are erased with any of several types of rubber. (It was after this use that the substance called rubber received its name.) Lighter parts of charcoal drawings can be erased with either a kneaded eraser (also called putty rubber) or a kneaded piece of fresh bread. Wax crayons and lithographic crayons cannot be erased unless they are on non-absorbent surfaces.


Camera: In photography, a tool for producing photographs, having a lightproof enclosure with an aperture and a shuttered lens through which the image of an object is focused and recorded on a photosensitive film or plate.


In a video, a device that receives the primary image on a light-sensitive cathode tube and transforms it into electrical impulses.


Chisel: A cutting tool consisting of a metal shaft beveled at one end to form the cutting edge. A chisel is specially designed for cutting a particular material — wood, metal or stone.


Hammer


Kiln: A special oven or furnace that can reach very high temperatures and is used to bake, or fire clay. Kilns may be electric, gas, or wood-fired. The one pictured here is an electric model.


Palette: A slab of wood, metal, marble, ceramic, plastic, glass, or paper, sometimes with a hole for the thumb, which an artist can hold while painting and on which the artist mixes paint. Anything from ice trays to disposable paper or Styrofoam plates might be used as a palette. A pane of glass with a white piece of paper attached to its underside makes a fine palette. It's especially versatile because the color of the paper back can be made to match a painting's ground, making colors easier to choose.


Potter’s Wheel: A revolving horizontal disk, sometimes called a head, on which clay is shaped manually into pottery vessels. The simplest form of wheel is the kickwheel. To operate it, the potter kicks or propels some form of disk, crank, or treddle in order to keep the turntable spinning. Also commonly used today are power-driven wheels whose speed can be regulated by the potter as he or she works. The potter's wheel was probably invented either by the Sumerians of the Tigris-Euphrates Basin or by the Chinese around 5000 BCE, perhaps even before the use of wheels for transportation. Potter's wheels continue to be used today, though commercial ceramic manufacture is dominated by slip casting. Nevertheless, they are part of the basic equipment of the artist-potter. 


Scissors: A hand-held cutting tool made up of two crossed and connected blades whose (inner) cutting edges slide past each other as they pivot to open and close. Each blade is extended from a ring-shaped handle (called bows) through which a user inserts opposing fingers. Scissors are commonly employed to cut such thin materials as string, hair, fabric, paper and sheets of other kinds, such as cellophane, foil, etc. "Scissors" can be used either as a singular or as a plural word, and is often referred to as a pair of.


Source:  ArtLex Art Dictionary at www.artlex.com