4.8: Summary

In this module we discussed the following:

• the basic techniques of drawing, painting, photography, and printmaking;
• additive and subtractive sculpture techniques;
• methods and materials in building design;
• techniques and challenges of film and video;
• and the growing impact of computers and digital tools on art making.

The creative process is a kind of critical thinking (Sayre, 3). It involves visual research, trial and error, being open to new information, evaluating results, and being self-critical. The medium or mixed-media are the raw materials that an artist uses to make their idea come to life.

Each medium has its own unique visual effects or characteristics. In the viewer context we read these unique visual effects and draw specific meanings from them. Photography, for example, has the ability to render a selection of life in such realistic detail that it is used in non-artistic practices for evidence collection. Even though Photoshop has become part of our vernacular in the Western world, and we know photographs can be manipulated, if we were to see a photograph of a courtroom scene our first inclination would be that it is a factual record of that moment, as opposed to an artist’s drawn rendering, which has a very different set of visual effects.