Explore – materials, techniques and art forms

The study design gives each of the three core words a specific job. Materials are the substances an art form is made from, together with their characteristics and properties: ochre, charcoal, oil paint, clay, lino, fabric, light-sensitive paper or pixels. Techniques are the ways those materials are manipulated with tools and equipment, such as glazing, wedging, cross-hatching, carving or layering.

Processes are the activities, procedures and investigations an artist works through, such as pulling a series of proofs, firing a kiln load, or shooting, selecting and editing a set of photographs. When investigating an art form’s history, ask how changes in materials, techniques and processes relate, and support your explanation with dated examples.

Painting shows the pattern clearly. Natural ochres remain important in particular Aboriginal art practices. For example, the NGV documents ochre paintings on stringybark by the Gumatj artists Nyapanyapa Yunupingu and Barrupu Yunupingu. Research the named artist, community, support and period rather than assigning one material history to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

In buon fresco, paint is applied to wet plaster in sections sized for a day’s work, bonding the image to the wall; fresco a secco instead uses dry plaster. Egg tempera dries quickly, which suits fine hatching but makes wet blending difficult. Oil paint, pigment ground in a slow-drying oil, allowed European painters from around the fifteenth century to blend tones softly and build transparent glazes.

Collapsible metal tubes of paint from the 1840s made paint easier to carry and outdoor working more convenient. Synthetic acrylic paints became available to artists in the mid-twentieth century. Common water-based acrylics dry quickly and can be thinned with water; in 1971–72, artists at Papunya made acrylic paintings on board drawing on designs associated with bodies, ground and objects. Later developments included large canvases by Pintupi artists in the 1980s and 1990s.

Use such comparisons to explain how a material’s properties, including drying time, can influence an artist’s choices.

Printmaking offers further examples: relief printing from carved wood blocks, used in East Asia long before Europe; intaglio techniques such as engraving and etching, in which ink sits in lines cut or bitten into a metal plate; lithography, developed around 1796, which relies on grease and water repelling each other on a flat stone; screenprinting, which transfers ink through unblocked areas of a stencil-bearing mesh; and digital printing.

In ceramics, distinguish forming methods such as hand-building, wheel throwing and mould-based slip casting from clay-body choices such as earthenware, stoneware and porcelain. These remain available together; investigate a dated example in its specific culture rather than treating them as a universal replacement sequence. Early photography included competing processes: daguerreotypes produced unique images, while Talbot developed paper-negative photography alongside this work. His calotype, patented in 1841, allowed multiple positive prints from one paper negative.

Reproducibility therefore did not begin with glass or film negatives. Compare these processes as different material choices, rather than a single sequence in which each replaced the previous one. For any art form you choose, ask the same three questions: what property changed, what new technique did it allow, and what new process or way of working followed?