Free Praxis Art (5134) Exam Flashcards

Elements are the visual ingredients—line, shape, form, color, value, texture, and space. Principles describe how those ingredients are organized, such as balance, contrast, emphasis, movement, rhythm, pattern, proportion, unity, and variety.

Hue names the color family, value describes lightness or darkness, and intensity describes saturation or dullness. Adding white changes tint, adding black changes shade, and mixing a complement usually reduces intensity toward a neutral.

Symmetrical balance mirrors comparable visual weight across an axis. Asymmetrical balance uses unlike elements whose visual weights still feel stable. Radial balance organizes elements around a central point.

The perceived subject is the figure, while surrounding or enclosed space is the ground. When contours support two plausible readings, attention can switch between them, showing that negative space is an active compositional element rather than empty leftover area.

Proportion compares sizes of parts within a whole. Scale compares an object or artwork with a reference such as the human body or its setting. Hierarchical scale makes a figure larger to signal greater status or importance rather than physical distance.

Linear perspective uses a horizon line, vanishing point, and converging orthogonals to organize measured space. Atmospheric perspective makes distant forms lighter, lower in contrast, less detailed, and often cooler because of the visual effects of air and distance.

Juxtaposition places unlike images or objects together to generate a new relationship. Appropriation deliberately reuses an existing image or form, making source and context important. Transformation materially or conceptually alters a source so its appearance or meaning changes.

Read the Safety Data Sheet and label for hazards, exposure routes, protective equipment, ventilation, storage, spills, and disposal. Substitute a safer material when practical; protective equipment is one control, not a replacement for safer materials or ventilation.

Suppress clay or silica dust with wet cleanup rather than sweeping. Solvent vapor and spray mist require appropriate local exhaust and closed, labeled storage. Contaminated solvents, pigments, and rags require proper waste and fire-safety procedures, not sink disposal.

Graphite gives controllable gray values and a slight sheen; charcoal makes broad, dark, easily lifted marks; pastel supplies dry, intense color but remains friable; ink produces decisive fluid marks that are difficult to erase. Paper tooth, blending, erasure, and fixation should match the medium.

Their binders and handling differ: watercolor uses water-soluble gum arabic and transparent washes; acrylic uses polymer emulsion and dries quickly; oil uses drying oil and allows slow blending; egg tempera uses egg-yolk emulsion and builds durable, fast-drying layers.

Upper layers should generally contain at least as much oil and remain at least as flexible as lower layers. A lean, fast-drying layer placed over a slower, oil-rich layer can set first and later crack as the underlying paint continues to move.

In relief processes such as woodcut or linocut, raised surfaces receive ink and recessed cuts usually print white. In intaglio processes such as engraving, etching, or drypoint, ink is held in incised lines below the plate surface and transferred under pressure.

Lithography is planographic: greasy image areas accept oily ink while damp nonimage areas repel it. Screenprinting forces ink through open mesh in a stencil while blocked areas prevent passage, allowing printing on many flat or shaped surfaces.

Registration aligns separate blocks, plates, screens, or colors on the same sheet. Edition notation such as 3/25 identifies a particular impression and the planned edition size; an artist's proof is outside that numbered edition, while a monotype is essentially unique.

Raster images use pixels and suit continuous-tone photographs, but enlarging beyond their resolution reveals pixelation. Vector images use mathematically defined paths and scale cleanly, making them effective for logos, diagrams, and flat-edged shapes.

Choose pixel dimensions for the intended output size; enlarging a small raster file reduces effective pixels per inch. JPEG is compact but lossy, TIFF can preserve high-quality raster data, and PNG offers lossless compression and transparency. Keep an editable master.

A wider aperture, slower shutter, or higher ISO makes the image brighter; the opposite makes it darker. Aperture also changes depth of field, shutter speed changes motion rendering, and high ISO usually increases visible noise, so equivalent exposures can look different.

Use a wider aperture, move closer to the subject, increase subject-to-background distance, or use a longer focal length from an appropriate position. A narrower aperture generally increases depth of field, while shutter speed primarily controls motion blur rather than focus depth.

Video planning organizes change over time through shot lists, storyboards, framing, sound, continuity, and editing. Installation planning treats the viewer's movement, scale, lighting, access, safety, and physical site as parts of the work rather than as neutral display conditions.

Additive processes build mass by modeling or joining material. Subtractive processes remove material by carving or cutting. Assemblage combines already formed objects or components, so fastening, structural stability, and the meanings carried by found materials become central decisions.

A maquette is a small planning model used to test composition, scale, and spatial relationships. An armature is an internal support that carries and stabilizes modeled material; it must be strong enough for the form and compatible with shrinkage, weight, and the final process.

A mold records a negative cavity of a model so another material can reproduce its form. In lost-wax casting, the wax model is removed from the investment and molten material fills the cavity; draft, undercuts, vents, and mold divisions affect whether casting succeeds.

Plastic clay can be formed; leather-hard clay is stiff enough to trim or carefully join; bone-dry clay has lost physical water and is fragile; bisqueware has completed an initial firing and remains porous; glaze-fired ware has been fired again to mature its glaze and clay body.

Scoring roughens the contact surfaces, slip supplies compatible clay-water material, and compression integrates the seam. Parts should have reasonably similar moisture levels; uneven thickness or moisture increases differential shrinkage, cracking, and separation during drying.

Both must mature within a compatible firing range, and their thermal expansion must be reasonably matched. Poor fit can produce shivering or unintended crazing. Kilns require suitable ventilation, clearance, firing controls, and cooling; a hot kiln should not be opened merely to speed handling.

Warp yarns are held under tension on the loom, while the weft travels over and under them across the width. Changing the interlacing sequence creates structures such as twill or satin, and beating controls how closely the weft rows pack together.

Felting entangles fibers through moisture, agitation, pressure, or needles. Basketry interlaces or coils relatively stiff elements into a self-supporting form. Papermaking suspends fibers in water, catches them on a screen, and presses and dries the sheet so the fibers bond.

Soldering joins compatible metals by flowing a lower-melting filler metal with heat and flux. Cold connections—such as rivets, tabs, wire, or screws—join parts mechanically without melting solder, which can protect heat-sensitive components and allow movable joints.

The support, ground, medium, adhesive, and coating should bond without harmful interaction and tolerate similar movement, moisture, and temperature change. Test unfamiliar combinations, avoid trapping unstable layers, and do not claim archival permanence without evidence.

Use clean, stable, preferably reversible materials; keep damaging adhesives away from the image; support the work's weight; and separate it from glazing when needed. The window, border, and frame should protect the work without overwhelming its composition.

Select a stable pedestal, mount, suspension, or barrier for the object's weight and center of gravity. Plan sightlines, circulation, lighting, accessibility, security, and distance from hazards so viewers can understand the work without endangering themselves or the object.

Buon fresco applies waterborne pigment to wet lime plaster and demands work in daily sections. Egg tempera dries quickly into crisp, often layered marks. Oil paint dries more slowly, enabling blending, translucent glazing, revisions, and deep tonal transitions.

Print matrices allowed multiple impressions to circulate religious, political, scientific, and artistic images. Photography added a mechanically captured image that could document and persuade while prompting artists to reconsider realism, framing, time, and originality.

Post-and-lintel systems limit opening width. Arches, vaults, and concrete helped Romans span larger spaces. Pointed arches, rib vaults, and flying buttresses opened Gothic walls for glass. Iron, steel, and reinforced concrete later enabled skeletal frames and long spans.

Prehistoric cave images and portable figures survive without written explanations, so proposed ritual or social functions require evidence. Egyptian official art used durable materials, registers, composite poses, and hierarchical scale to support kingship, funerary continuity, and cosmic order.

Classical Greek art emphasized proportion, balanced movement, and idealized human form, while architecture codified column orders. Romans adapted Greek forms but expanded veristic portraiture, imperial propaganda, concrete construction, arches, vaults, and large civic interiors.

Byzantine works favor frontal sacred figures, gold grounds, mosaics, and domes. Romanesque churches appear massive, with round arches and sculpted portals. Gothic buildings use pointed arches, rib vaults, buttressing, greater height, and stained glass.

Artists revived classical models, studied anatomy and nature, used linear and atmospheric perspective, and organized human-centered spaces. Humanism elevated individual achievement and ancient learning; patrons used commissions to express belief, status, and political identity.

Baroque art often uses dramatic light, diagonal movement, theatrical space, and intense action. Rococo favors intimate aristocratic leisure, pastel color, and ornate asymmetry. Neoclassicism turns to restrained contours, moral exemplars, archaeological classicism, and clearer geometric order.

Romanticism privileged imagination, emotion, nature's power, and dramatic events. Realism treated ordinary labor and current social conditions as serious subjects. Impressionism pursued modern life and transient light with visible strokes, altered framing, and outdoor observation.

Modern and contemporary artists used divergent strategies: Cubist viewpoints, Dada readymades, Surrealist imagery, abstraction, performance, conceptual instructions, installation, new media, and identity critique. Medium, process, context, and proposition may matter as much as resemblance.

Use evidence of region, period, religion, material, and format: for example, Indian temple iconography, Chinese literati ink painting, locally shaped Buddhist sculpture, or Japanese ukiyo-e prints. Beliefs can travel while forms change through patronage and cultural exchange.

A museum object may originally have operated through masquerade, royal ceremony, initiation, healing, devotion, or ancestor relationships. Material, movement, sound, costume, performer, audience, and access can contribute to meaning; cultural and geographic specificity matters.

Relate the work to its culture and setting, not a single pan-American category. Mesoamerican ceremonial centers, Andean textiles and metalwork, and North American pottery, carving, beadwork, or earthworks can encode authority, cosmology, ancestry, exchange, and community use.

Across distinct Pacific cultures, navigation, genealogy, exchange, ceremony, and relationships with ancestors or spiritual power can shape carving, barkcloth, body arts, architecture, and performance. Meaning may depend on who activates or sees an object, not only on its isolated formal appearance.

Formalism emphasizes the organization of visual elements. Representationalism asks how and why the work depicts or refers to a subject. Expressionism values the communication or embodiment of feeling. Each theory directs attention to different evidence, not mere preference.

It examines apparent oppositions and hierarchies—such as original/copy, center/margin, or high/low—and asks how the work destabilizes the categories it seems to rely on. The goal is to expose tensions and excluded assumptions, not simply to declare that the work has no meaning.

Description identifies observable features; analysis explains how those features relate and organize the work; interpretation proposes meanings supported by visual and contextual evidence; judgment evaluates the work using stated criteria. Later claims should remain accountable to earlier evidence.

A viewer's background affects what is noticed, so multiple responses are possible. Iconographic interpretation tests symbols and narratives against cultural and historical sources. A strong reading acknowledges its lens, cites evidence, and separates supported inference from reaction.