Drawing is a visual art that uses an instrument to mark paper or another two-dimensional surface. The instrument might be pencils, crayons, pens with inks, brushes with paints or combinations of these, and in more modern times, computer styluses with graphics tablets.
Printmaking is the process of creating artworks by printing, normally on paper, but also on fabric, wood, metal, and other surfaces. "Traditional printmaking" normally covers only the process of creating prints using a hand processed technique, rather than a photographic reproduction of a visual artwork which would be printed using an electronic machine ; however, there is some cross-over between traditional and digital printmaking, including risograph.
Max Ernst was a German painter, sculptor, printmaker, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was a primary pioneer of the Dada movement and Surrealism in Europe. He had no formal artistic training, but his experimental attitude toward the making of art resulted in his invention of frottage—a technique that uses pencil rubbings of textured objects and relief surfaces to create images—and grattage, an analogous technique in which paint is scraped across canvas to reveal the imprints of the objects placed beneath. Ernst is noted for his unconventional drawing methods as well as for creating novels and pamphlets using the method of collages. He served as a soldier for four years during World War I, and this experience left him shocked, traumatised and critical of the modern world. During World War II he was designated an "undesirable foreigner" while living in France.
Surrealist automatism is a method of art-making in which the artist suppresses conscious control over the making process, allowing the unconscious mind to have great sway. Early 20th-century Dadaists, such as Hans Arp, made some use of this method through chance operations. Surrealist artists, most notably André Masson, adapted to art the automatic writing method of André Breton and Philippe Soupault who composed with it Les Champs Magnétiques in 1919. The Automatic Message (1933) was one of Breton's significant theoretical works about automatism.
Surrealism in art, poetry, and literature uses numerous techniques and games to provide inspiration. Many of these are said to free imagination by producing a creative process free of conscious control. The importance of the unconscious as a source of inspiration is central to the nature of surrealism.
Marquetry is the art and craft of applying pieces of veneer to a structure to form decorative patterns, designs. The technique may be applied to case furniture or even seat furniture, to decorative small objects with smooth, veneerable surfaces or to freestanding pictorial panels appreciated in their own right.
Brass rubbing was originally a largely British enthusiasm for reproducing onto paper monumental brasses – commemorative brass plaques found in churches, usually originally on the floor, from between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. The concept of recording textures of things is more generally called making a rubbing. What distinguishes rubbings from frottage is that rubbings are meant to reproduce the form of something being transferred, whereas frottage is usually only intended to use a general texture.
Loplop, or more formally, Loplop, Father Superior of the Birds, is the name of a birdlike character that was an alter ego of the Dada-Surrealist artist Max Ernst. Ernst had a ongoing fascination with birds, which often appear in his work. Loplop functioned as a familiar animal. William Rubin wrote of Ernst "Among his more successful works of the thirties are a series begun in 1930 around the theme of his alter ego, Loplop, Superior of the Birds." Loplop is an iconic image of surrealist art, the painting Loplop Introduces Loplop (1930) appears on the front cover of the Gaëtan Picon's book Surrealist and Surrealism 1919-1939, and the drawing and collage Loplop Presents (1932) was used as the frontispiece of Patrick Waldberg's book Surrealism.
The paranoiac-critical method is a surrealist technique developed by Salvador Dalí in the early 1930s. He employed it in the production of paintings and other artworks, especially those that involved optical illusions and other multiple images. The technique consists of the artist invoking a paranoid state. The result is a deconstruction of the psychological concept of identity, such that subjectivity becomes the primary aspect of the artwork.
Pyrography or pyrogravure is the free handed art of decorating wood or other materials with burn marks resulting from the controlled application of a heated object such as a poker. It is also known as pokerwork or wood burning.
Gyotaku is the traditional Japanese method of printing fish, a practice which dates back to the mid-1800s. This form of nature printing was used by fishermen to record their catches, but has also become an art form of its own.
Little Machine Constructed by Minimax Dadamax in Person (Von minimax dadamax selbst konstruiertes maschinchen) (1919–20) is a mixed-media work of art by the German dadaist and surrealist Max Ernst.
Stone rubbing is the practice of creating an image of surface features of a stone on paper. The image records features such as natural textures, inscribed patterns or lettering. By rubbing hard rendering materials over the paper, pigment is deposited over protrusions and on edges; depressions remain unpigmented since the pliable paper moves away from the rendering material. Common rendering materials include rice paper, charcoal, wax, graphite or inksticks. Over time, the practice of stone rubbing can cause permanent damage to cultural monuments due to abrasion. For an artist, stone rubbings can become an entire body of creative work that is framed and displayed.
Collage is a technique of art creation, primarily used in the visual arts, but in music too, by which art results from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole.
In the visual arts, texture is the perceived surface quality of a work of art. It is an element of two-dimensional and three-dimensional designs and is distinguished by its perceived visual and physical properties. Use of texture, along with other elements of design, can convey a variety of messages and emotions.
Carbon dust is an artistic technique in which carbon dust is applied to a surface via dry brushes. Highlights may be painted on or scratched out later in the process. Dust is prepared by rubbing carbon pencils against an abrasive surface, such as a metal file. The technique was popularized by Max Brödel (1870-1941) and became widely used among medical and scientific illustrators in the twentieth century.
A colored pencil, coloured pencil, pencil crayon, map pencil, or coloured/colouring lead is an art medium constructed of a narrow, pigmented core encased in a wooden cylindrical case. Unlike graphite and charcoal pencils, colored pencils' cores are wax- or oil-based and contain varying proportions of pigments, additives, and binding agents. Water-soluble (watercolor) pencils and pastel pencils are also manufactured as well as colored cores for mechanical pencils.
Artists' charcoal is charcoal used as a dry art medium. Both compressed charcoal and charcoal sticks are used. The marks it leaves behind on paper are much less permanent that with other media such as graphite, and so lines can easily be erased and blended. Charcoal can produce lines that are very light or intensely black. The dry medium can be applied to almost any surface from smooth to very coarse. Fixatives are used with charcoal drawings to solidify the position to prevent erasing or rubbing off of charcoal dusts.
Grattage is a technique in surrealist painting which consists of "scratching" fresh paint with a sharp blade.
Jill O'Bryan is an American contemporary artist whose work draws upon breath, bodily movement and the natural environment in order to examine the experience of being, time and place. She is most known for her "Breath Drawings," in which she records each of her breaths with an individual mark thousands of times, and her ground rubbings (frottages), which document her physical engagement with the New Mexico desert mesa. Southwest Contemporary wrote, "O’Bryan’s artmaking is not an act of representational picture-making but a practice of accumulating the residue of recorded time and place through the physical actions of her body. Her process is performative, specifically located in time and space, and records moment-to-moment interactions with the elements."
