Chapter 3Media

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

• 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

For the Love of God, 2007, Damien Hirst, platinum life-size cast of a human skull, human teeth, and diamondsA 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

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.

Media in Two-Dimensional Art

• 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 MediumsWhat 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

Seated Woman, 1966-1967. Willem De Kooning. Charcoal on paper,

Albrecht Durer. Open Book, 1527. silverpoint

At the Milliner’s, 1883, Edgar Degas, pastel on paper

Drawing: Wet MediaWet 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.

The Holy Family, circa 1758 Giovanni Battista TiepoloDrawing, Brown ink and wash over black chalk,11 3/4 x 8 1/2 in

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.

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.

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.

Drawing for Transient Rainbow, 2003, Cai Guo-Qiang, gunpowder on paper

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

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)

The Printmaker’s Workshop, 19th century, Edo Period, School of Yokohama, Japan, colored woodblock print

Intaglio PrintmakingIntaglio: 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 Weeping Woman (La Femme qui pleure), 1937, Pablo Picasso, etching, acquaint & drypoint

The Artist and His Model (Pablo Picasso) uses aquatint to create value.

Lithography and Serigraphy PrintmakingLithography: 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