Creating: Media, Techniques, and Processes
Creating: Media, Techniques, and Processes
This domain tests studio knowledge: which medium produces which effect, how a process is sequenced, and what safety or craft constraints apply. Items frequently ask you to choose the medium or process best suited to a stated goal.
Drawing and painting
- Dry drawing media: graphite (gradation, erasable), charcoal (broad tonal masses, smudges easily), conté crayon (pigmented, firm), pastel (dry pigment bound loosely, needs fixative). Wet media: ink with pen, brush, or wash.
- Oil paint dries slowly by oxidation, allowing wet-in-wet blending and thin transparent glazes over opaque passages; "fat over lean" prevents cracking.
- Acrylic dries fast by evaporation, can be thinned with water, and supports layering and impasto without long waits.
- Watercolor is transparent; white comes from reserved paper, not white pigment. Techniques: wet-on-wet, wet-on-dry, dry brush, masking, lifting.
Printmaking
Relief (woodcut, linocut): uncut surface prints. Intaglio (etching, drypoint, aquatint, mezzotint): ink sits in incised lines, printed under high pressure. Lithography is planographic, based on grease and water repulsion. Screenprinting is a stencil process. Editions require consistent registration and inking.
Sculpture and ceramics
Subtractive carving, additive modeling, casting (lost-wax bronze), assemblage, and construction. Hand-building: pinch, coil, slab; wheel-throwing. Clay states: plastic, leather-hard, bone-dry, bisque, glaze-fired.
Worked example
An item asks which process best yields fine, dense detail in an edition of 25. Reasoning: relief cannot easily hold hairline detail and carves away negative space; intaglio incises the line itself and holds it under pressure, so etching or drypoint reproduces fine line consistently. Answer: intaglio.
Traps that cost marks
- Reversing relief and intaglio: in relief the raised surface prints; in intaglio the recessed line prints.
- Assuming white paint is used in watercolor; the paper is reserved instead.
- Ignoring safety: solvents need ventilation, clay and glaze dusts are respiratory hazards, kilns need clearance.