Medium Category

Paint Media

Traditional paints create one category of art medium. Within the paint medium, several types of paint exist each with its own qualities. Acrylic paints make an excellent beginner medium. They mix, thin and clean up with water while requiring little drying time. Watercolors provide another medium choice. Watercolors may prove difficult to master at first, due to the fast drying time and unforgiving brush strokes they create. Usually considered the most advanced of art paint media, traditional oil paints require turpentine for clean up, knowledge of layering qualities and an extended drying time. Other types of paint less common but still a part of the art media category include tole, airbrush and fabric paints.

Drawing Media

Drawing materials make up another medium category. Traditional drawing media for creating black and white drawings include graphite pencil, charcoal pencils, charcoal sticks and pens. A working knowledge of shading technique is helpful in working with black and white media so you can create depth. Colored drawing media include colored pencils, pastel pencils, chalk pastels, oil pastels and various markers. Colored media, such as pastels, offer the option of blending, much like paint, to create various new colors.

Sculpture Media

Three-dimensional art offers an enormous category of art media. Virtually any found object might be used to create a sculpture. Since art media includes any materials used as part of the art creation, the list of art media for sculptures particularly, is infinite. Traditional sculpture media however, includes wood, paper maché, clay, wire, metal, stone and found objects. This media often receives other media, such as paint, added to it in the making of sculptures.

Photography

Photography is the process, activity and art of creating still pictures by recording radiation on a radiation-sensitive medium, such as a photographic film, or electronic image sensors. Photography uses foremost radiation in the UV, visible and near-IR spectrum.[1] For common purposes the term light is used instead of radiation. Light reflected or emitted from objects form a real image on a light sensitive area (film or plate) or a FPA pixel array sensor by means of a pin hole or lens in a device known as a camera during a timed exposure. The result on film or plate is a latent image, subsequently developed into a visual image (negative or diapositive). An image on paper base is known as a print. The result on the FPA pixel array sensor is an electrical charge at each pixel which is electronically processed and stored in a computer (raster)-image file for subsequent display or processing. Photography has many uses for business, science, manufacturing (f.i. Photolithography), art, and recreational purposes.

Film

Films are cultural artifacts created by specific cultures, which reflect those cultures, and, in turn, affect them. Film is considered to be an important art form, a source of popular entertainment and a powerful method for educating — or indoctrinating — citizens. The visual elements of cinema give motion pictures a universal power of communication. Some films have become popular worldwide attractions by using dubbing or subtitles that translate the dialogue into the language of the viewer.Films are made up of a series of individual images called frames. When these images are shown rapidly in succession, a viewer has the illusion that motion is occurring. The viewer cannot see the flickering between frames due to an effect known as persistence of vision, whereby the eye retains a visual image for a fraction of a second after the source has been removed. Viewers perceive motion due to a psychological effect called beta movement.