Media, Materials and Techniques
Drawing media
Graphite is graded H (hard, pale) to B (soft, black); HB is the middle. Charcoal gives dense darks and smudges easily; pastel is pigment bound lightly, available soft or oil; pen and ink demand decisive, irreversible marks.
Painting media and their binders
- Watercolour – pigment with gum arabic; transparent, corrected only by lifting; washes, wet-on-wet, dry brush.
- Gouache – watercolour plus chalk; opaque, rewettable, matt.
- Tempera – egg-yolk emulsion; fast-drying, crisp, layered in fine strokes.
- Oil – pigment in linseed oil; slow drying, so wet-in-wet blending, glazing (thin transparent layers) and impasto (thick ridges) are possible.
- Acrylic – synthetic polymer emulsion; dries fast, adheres widely, can imitate watercolour or oil.
- Fresco – buon fresco: pigment in wet lime plaster, fusing with the wall as calcium carbonate forms; fresco secco: pigment on dry plaster, less durable. Sfumato and chiaroscuro are handling methods rather than media.
Printmaking families
Relief – woodcut, linocut: cut away the non-printing area. Intaglio – engraving (burin), etching (acid bites the plate), drypoint (burr), aquatint, mezzotint. Planographic – lithography: grease drawing on limestone, water-and-ink separation, no cut surface. Stencil/screen – serigraphy.
Support and ground
Canvas, panel, paper, wall. Size seals the surface; gesso provides the white ground. Follow fat over lean so lower layers remain flexible.
Worked example
Two prints of the same portrait: one has bold, slightly ragged white-edged lines; the other has a fine, wiry, swelling line. Reasoning: the first is a relief print, because the line is the uncut surface and edges chip; the second is an intaglio etching, where acid bites a fine groove and the line can swell with biting time.
Traps
Saying etching uses a burin (that is engraving); calling lithography relief; expecting corrections in buon fresco; applying acrylic over oil.