Chapter 3
Media
Media
Since the earliest of times, traditional media have been
used in drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture, and
craft-making. As knowledge and technology progressed,
nontraditional media emerged for newly developed
disciplines, including mixed media, video and film,
digital imaging, and performance.
The Importance of Materials
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What is meant by the word media? Media can be
defined as the actual material substances used to create
an artwork.
What is meant by the word discipline with regards to
the visual arts? Disciplines are the various branches of
art making activity, like painting or video.
Fig. 6. shows you a
4. Explain why Damien Hirst used diamonds on a
skull in fig. 3.2. The skull traditionally symbolizes
mortality and the impermanence of earthly things
which are well represented by the diamonds. He has
taken this to an extreme for his audience.
What is Important About
these Materials
The artists used this variety of media to make statements about society. Materials that everyone can
identify with.
•The skull traditionally symbolizes mortality and the impermanence of earthly things which are
well represented by the diamonds. He has taken this to an extreme for his audience.
•This is a traditional vanitas painting. Objects in such paintings generally represented the passage
of time and life.
•Materials are the physical embodiment of the idea. Nam June Paik’s video installation refers to:
advertising, signage, televised imagery.
For the Love of God, 2007, Damien Hirst, platinum life-size cast of a human
skull, human teeth, and diamonds
A Table of Desserts, Netherlands, 1640. Jan Davidsz. de Heem. Oil on canvas, 58 7/10" 3 79 9/10". Louvre, Paris.
Electronic Superhighway: Continental U. S., Alaska, Hawaii, 1995, Nam June Paik, 49-channel closed circuit video installation
Media in Two-Dimensional Art
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Drawing
• Supports and grounds
• Dry Media
• Wet Media
Printmaking
• Relief
• Intaglio
• Lithography
• Serigraphy
• Monotype
Painting
• Encaustic
• Fresco
• Tempera, Gouache, and Watercolor
• Oil, Acrylic and Sprayed paint
What do Artist’s Use for Drawing?
Which materials are generally used for drawings?
Various forms of pencils, sanguine chalk, pastel, and silverpoint are examples of the
range of dry media used in drawing.
What is a support?
The support in drawing, or in any other two-dimensional art, is the surface or material
that underlies the artwork. Supports can range from natural surfaces such as a rock wall
to many types of paper, parchment, or wood, or any surface that can hold wet or dry
media or can be incised.
What is the most common drawing tool? The pencil.
Why would artists need pencils that vary in quality? Pencils come in degrees of
hardness or softness. Hard leads (like a 4H) have more clay and less graphite. These
pencils are often used for images requiring analytical lines or controlled lines, such as
mechanical or architectural drawings. . Soft leads (like a 6B) have more graphite and less
clay and are used to achieve tonal effects or expressive line.
What is a ground?
A ground can be the surface upon which a drawing is made but grounds are generally
liquid coatings applied to supports like a gesso.
The ground is put on top of the surface. Let’s say you have canvas as the support. The
artist would apply gesso to the canvas (gesso being the ground) and would apply the
medium on the surface of the ground.
The Dry Mediums
What is charcoal?
Charcoal is a carbon stick created from burnt wood.
What are chalks and pastels?
Chalk and pastels are colored materials held together by wax or glue and shaped into
sticks. Sticks with more colored material and less wax produce soft smudgy lines, while
those with more wax or glue render precise and controlled lines.
Chalks and pastels are particularly dependent upon a textured ground to grab the media
and hold it. All charcoal, chalk and pastel drawings must be sprayed with a fixative to
keep them from smudging.
What is a silverpoint?
A silverpoint drawing is produced by a thin stylus made of silver that leaves marks on a
prepared support such as paper or wood coated with layers of gesso as a ground.
Metal point (silverpoint) was used in ancient Rome through the Renaissance, but
eventually lost favor when graphite was discovered. You cannot erase a metal point
drawing. You must either incorporate mistakes into the drawing or start over. The range
of values is fairly limited, but the finished product can be very delicate and beautiful.
Drawing: Dry Media
Farberware Coffepot, Jeanette Pasin Sloan,
Colored pencil on paperboard
Albrecht Durer. Open Book, 1527.
silverpoint
Seated Woman, 1966-1967. Willem De Kooning.
Charcoal on paper,
At the Milliner’s, 1883, Edgar Degas, pastel on paper
Drawing: Wet Media
Wet media commonly uses ink, pen, and brush.
The combination of lines made by pen marks and washes applied by brush makes
visually fluid imagery. Drawing and painting overlap in artworks done in ink.
How could Tiepolo’s Holy Family be
considered both a drawing and painting?
They combine the more linear qualities of
drawing with the more fluid qualities of a
monochromatic painting.
The Holy Family, circa 1758 Giovanni Battista
Tiepolo
Drawing, Brown ink and wash over black chalk,
11 3/4 x 8 1/2 in
Experimental Drawing Media and
New Technologies
This a good example of needing additional information
to fully understand the purpose of a work of art. The
artist is Chinese by birth and presents site specific
explosive events throughout the world. Fireworks in
China, as here in the United States, are used for
celebrations. Yet Cai explores violence, creation,
mysticism and even materialism with his ‘events’.
Perhaps he is representing the transient quality of
‘things’ just as Hirst was doing with his skull covered
with diamonds.
Drawing for Transient Rainbow, 2003, Cai
Guo-Qiang, gunpowder on paper
With this drawing, Cai captures the ‘fleeting sprays of
light caused by the fireworks. Yet, the drawing lives on
long after the event of the fireworks has occurred.’
(MOMA)
What are raster-based drawings? They are computer
generated drawings that are composed of millions of
dots of color rather than based on mathematical
formulas.
Nara Convention Hall, Nara, Japan,1992, Arata
Isozaki, computer-generated print
Printmaking: What is a Print?
Printmaking includes any medium that can produce
multiples of an image or a design through a specific process.
Please note, that I do not use the word ‘copies’.
Each print is considered an original.
There are several different types of printmaking such as:
relief, intaglio, lithography, and serigraphy. As well,
monotype is a category as well but with unique qualities of
its own.
What are the four basic methods of printmaking?
Relief, Intaglio, Lithography and Serigraphy.
Printmaking Demo
Relief Printmaking
The Printmaker’s Workshop, 19th century, Edo Period, School of Yokohama, Japan, colored woodblock print
Define relief printmaking: Any printmaking technique in which the matrix (working surface) is
carved with knives so that areas not meant to be printed (that is, not meant to leave an image)
are below the surface of the matrix.
What is the subject matter of The Printmaker’s Workshop? It describes the process of creating
a woodcut print.
What are two types of relief printing techniques?
Woodcut (which uses wood as the substrate)
Linocut (which uses a type of linoleum as a substrate)
Intaglio Printmaking
Intaglio: A printmaking process in which lines are incised or etched into a metal plate, which is then
inked and wiped so that the ink remains only in the incised lines.
Drypoint: In which the design is scratched into the surface of a metal plate.
Engraving: The process of incising or scratching lines on a hard material, such as wood or a
metal plate.
Etching: : The creation of lines or areas on glass or a metal plate, using acid that eats into the
exposed surface but leaves coated, protected areas unchanged. When etched plates are inked,
they can be used in printmaking.
Aquatint: Aquatint is a process related to etching in which the metal plate is covered with a
powder of acid-resistant resin. The plate is then heated, causing the resin to melt and adhere to
the surface. The matrix is then placed in an acid bath, where the acid “eats” pits into surface of
the plate. Using aquatint, the artist can achieve painterly effects that cannot be achieve with any
other intaglio process.
What is a burin?
A burin is a thin, pointed, metal tool used to incise lines into the matrix in intaglio printing.
What are some of the qualities often seen in engravings?
An engraving produces thin, precise lines that can create both detail and rich values. It is often
used in book illustrations, because a large number of images can be produced without breaking
down the matrix .
Prints
Christ Crucified between the Two Thieves, 1653,
Rembrandt, Drypoint
Knight, Death, and the Devil, 1513,
Albrecht Dürer, engraving
Prints
The Artist and His Model (Pablo Picasso) uses aquatint to
create value.
The Weeping Woman (La Femme qui pleure),
1937, Pablo Picasso, etching, acquaint & drypoint
Lithography and Serigraphy
Printmaking
Lithography: A form of printmaking, invented in the nineteenth century, based on
the principle that water and oil do not mix.
After the image has been drawn onto the surface of the limestone, the stone
is treated with a mixture of nitric acid, water, and gum arabic. This treatment
allowed for the ink to stick to the image that was drawn with a special type of
grease pencil, known as tusche, but not to the rest of the stone.
This solution does not actually etch the limestone. Therefore, the stone can
be reused after it has been treated in such a way that the first image is
‘erased’.
(Contemporary artists use litho plates rather than limestone.)
How can lithography have the visual qualities of both painting and drawing
Tusche comes in stick form and liquid form and can be drawn like a pencil or
painted like ink.
Serigraphy: A printmaking technique in which ink is applied to a stencil that has
been temporarily adhered to a stretched cloth.
Prints
Marilyn Monroe, 1967, Andy Warhol, one of a portfolio of ten screenprints
on white paper,
Born, 2002, Kiki Smith, lithograph
Monotype Printmaking
Monotype is a printmaking process that yields only one copy of a print. A
monotype is often created with oil paint or watercolor on a nonabsorbent
surface (many people use plexiglass today), and the resulting image is
transferred to a sheet of paper.
Most monotypes (or monoprints) are made in a “reductive” manner. Take a
look at the Degas image in the slide…He probably covered the matrix with
fairly thick black ink, and using brushes and other absorbent material, lifted
up the ink in the areas you see as lighter in image. Areas like the dancer’s skirt
appear to have been highlighted with white. Generally in all printmaking
techniques, white is achieved through the white of the paper.
What is the difference in appearance and method among the three types of
prints known as lithograph, serigraph, and monotype print?
Each uses a different process to achieve a variety of effects. Both lithography
and serigraphy can create multiple prints, while a monotype is an edition of
one.
Prints
Two Marquesans, 1902, Paul Gauguin, monotype
The Ballet Master. c. 1874, Edgar Degas, 22 x 27 inches.
monotype