Techniques and Materials of Artistic Production: Drawing, Painting, Sculpture, Printmaking, Photography and Digital Media
This domain tests material competence: which technique, support, binder and matrix - and what each choice makes possible or impossible.
Drawing and painting
- Drawing: dry media (graphite, charcoal, sanguine, pastel) versus fluid (ink, wash); paper weight in g/m² and grain determine what the surface accepts.
- Fresco: pigment in water on fresh lime plaster (buon fresco); carbonation locks it in; a giornata is one day's patch; retouching on dry plaster is secco and less durable.
- Tempera: egg-yolk binder, fast drying, crisp line (medieval panels). Oil: slow drying, glazes, deep darks (Van Eyck's diffusion); ground, imprimació and gesso prepare the support. Acrylic: polymer emulsion, from the 1950s, fast and flexible.
- Pigments: mineral versus organic; ultramarine from lapis lazuli cost more than gold in some contracts.
Sculpture and printmaking
- Sculpture: additive (clay, wax), subtractive (carving marble or wood), casting (lost-wax bronze), assembly and installation.
- Print families: relief (woodcut, linocut), intaglio (etching - acid bites the plate; burin engraving; aquatint), planographic (lithography, Senefelder 1796), stencil/screen (serigraphy).
- Edition conventions: numbered impression (12/50), P.A. (prova d'artista), the matrix, and the "original print" criterion - the artist works the matrix, not a reproduction of a painting.
Photography and digital
- Camera obscura → Niépce's heliograph (1826/27), Daguerre's daguerreotype (1839), Talbot's calotype negative-positive (1841), gelatin silver, digital sensor.
- Exposure triangle: ISO, aperture (f-number), shutter speed; focal length controls angle and compression.
- Raster (pixels, ppi) versus vector (paths); dpi for output; colour profiles; lossless versus lossy formats.
Worked example
An artist wants 40 identical, affordable, hand-made images. Etching: acid on a metal plate, one matrix, an edition of 40, numbered and signed. Screenprint: stencil on mesh, flat colour, larger editions. An inkjet output of a scanned painting is a reproduction, not an original print, and must not be catalogued as such. Naming the matrix and the edition logic completes the answer.
Traps that cost marks
- Calling a giclée photocopy a grabado.
- Confusing the process (etching) with the result (the print, estampa).
- Believing fresco can be freely corrected after the plaster dries.
- Mixing up ISO (sensitivity) with shutter speed, or f-number with focal length.