Visual arts

The Mona Lisa is one of the most recognizable artistic paintings in the Western world.

The visual arts are a class of art forms, including painting, sculpture, photography, printmaking and others, that focus on the creation of works which are primarily visual in nature. Visual Arts that produce three-dimensional objects, such as sculpture and architecture, are dealt with in plastic arts.

Arts or the Arts encompasses visual arts, performing arts, language arts, and culinary arts. Many artistic disciplines involve aspects of the visual arts as well as other types, so these definitions are not strict.

The current usage of visual arts includes fine arts and well as crafts, but this was not always the case. In Britain and elsewhere, a visual artist referred to a person working in the fine arts (such as painting, sculpture, or printmaking) and not the handicraft, craft, or applied art disciplines. This distinction was emphasized by artists of the Arts and Crafts movement who valued vernacular artforms as much as high forms. The movement contrasted with modernists who sought to withhold the high arts from the masses by keeping them esoteric. Art schools made a distinction between the fine arts and the crafts in such a way that a craftsperson could not be considered a practitioner of art.

The practice of the visual arts in the present day is known as contemporary art.

1 Drawing
2 Painting
3 Printmaking
4 Photography
5 Art-Related terms in the Visual Arts
6 References
7 See also
8 External links

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Drawing

Drawing is a means of making an image, using any of a wide variety of tools and techniques. It generally involves making marks on a surface by applying pressure from a tool, or moving a tool across a surface. Common tools are graphite pencils, pen and ink, inked brushes, wax color pencils, crayons, charcoals, pastels, and markers. Digital tools which simulate the effects of these are also used. The main techniques used in drawing are: line drawing, hatching, crosshatching, random hatching, scribbling, stippling, and blending. An artist who excels in drawing is referred to as a draftsman or draughtsman".

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Painting

Painting taken literally is the practice of applying pigment suspended in a carrier (or medium) and a binding agent (a glue) to a surface (support) such as paper, canvas or a wall. However, when used in an artistic sense it means the use of this activity in combination with drawing, composition and other aesthetic considerations in order to manifest the expressive and conceptual intention of the practitioner. Painting is also used to express spiritual motifs and ideas; sites of this kind of painting range from artwork depicting mythological figures on pottery to The Sistine Chapel to the human body itself.

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Printmaking

Printmaking is creating for artistic purposes an image on a matrix which is then transferred to a two-dimensional (flat) surface by means of ink (or another form of pigmentation). Except in the case of a monotype, the same matrix can be used to produce many examples of the print. Historically, the major techniques (also called mediums) involved are woodcut, line engraving, etching, lithography, and screenprinting (serigraphy, silkscreening) but there are many others, including modern digital techniques. Normally the surface upon which the print is printed is paper, but there are exceptions, from cloth and vellum to modern materials. Prints in the Western tradition produced before about 1830 are known as old master prints. There are other major printmaking traditions, especially that of Japan (ukiyo-e).

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Photography

Photography is the process of making pictures by means of the action of light. Light patterns reflected or emitted from objects are recorded onto a sensitive medium or storage chip through a timed exposure. The process is done through mechanical, chemical or digital devices known as cameras.

The word comes from the Greek words φως phos ("light"), and γραφις graphis ("stylus", "paintbrush") or γραφη graphê, together meaning "drawing with light" or "representation by means of lines" or "drawing." Traditionally, the product of photography has been called a photograph. The term photo is an abbreviation; many people also call them pictures. In digital photography, the term image has begun to replace photograph. (The term image is traditional in geometric optics.)

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