Art Terms
| • Faux painting or Faux finishing | • Installation | • Still life |
| • Found art | • Pop art | • Trompe l'œil |
| • Sculpture |
Mold-Making Terms
| • Armature | • Mold or mould | • Positive |
| • Cure | • Negative | • Undercut |
| • Embossing | • Plaster |
A
Armature
In sculpture, armature is a framework around which a sculpture is built. This framework provides structure and stability, especially when a flexible material such as wax or clay is being used as the medium. When sculpting the human figure, the armature is analogous to the major skeleton and has essentially the same purpose: to hold the body erect. An armature is often made of special, thick, armature aluminum wire that is strong enough to support material, but can also be bent to acquire a desired shape. Chicken wire and many other materials combined, such as wood and metal rods, can also be used.
An example of an armature would be the hidden structure that holds up the Statue of Liberty in New York City. Designed by Gustave Eiffel, the armature can be seen from below by visitors to the base of the sculpture's interior.
C
Cure
In sculpture a material is cured once it has changed states after a chemical reaction. Liquid plaster that has changed into hard plaster is said to have cured once it's dry. It is not like a metal, which has melted and then cooled to a hardened state (for example, bronze). Instead, it is a set of components that have been mixed in a liquid state (for example plaster powder and water). Once the chemical reaction occurs, it permanently hardens. Many materials release heat as they are changing (plaster, for example, can actually burn skin if too much of it is allowed to harden around a limb). Although these materials may release heat while curing, because the material is not melted initially to become a liquid (like bronze is melted down in bronze casting), this type of casting is called cold setting. Examples of cold setting casting materials are plaster, resin, and rubbers.
E
Embossing
Embossing is an age-old process of forming a three-dimensional image or design in a thin material, such as paper, cloth, leather or metal. A hard object can be pressed into the surface of the material and removed, leaving an impression. Alternatively, a thin material can be placed on a textured hard object and then hammered to take the texture. Embossing is often used when making gift cards and other stationary. Thin sheets of metal are often embossed to make ornamental surfaces for jewelry, boxes, and other decorative objects.
F
Faux painting or Faux finishing
These terms are used to describe a wide range of decorative painting techniques. From the French word for "fake", faux painting began over 5000 years ago as a way of replicating materials such as marble and wood with paint. Faux finishing continues to be used today. For example, the movie industry uses faux finishing to create illusions, such as transforming styrofoam into rocks and bricks. Faux finishing is also used to decorate furniture and walls in both public and domestic spaces.
Found art
Found art describes art created from the undisguised, but often modified, use of objects that are not normally used for or considered to be art. Marcel Duchamp was the originator of this in the early 20th-century, and called this type of art a "readymade".
I
Installation
An installation is a type of artwork that can sometimes be confused with a sculpture. While the difference between a sculpture and an installation can be hard to determine, generally a sculpture is a 3-dimensional object which creates positive and negative spaces to entertain the viewer's eye. An installation is often a combination of things that become a single piece occupying a space that often the viewer themselves can move through. It can include 3-D items such as objects or sculptures and 2-D items such as photographs, drawings, paintings and other mediums such as projections, sound and light.
Suggested visuals to accompany the definition:
- • Artist: Jason Rhodes
- • Artist: Banks Violette
- • Artist: Anne Hamilton
- • Artist: Ernesto Neto
M
Mold or mould
A mold is an object with a hollow interior that is filled with a liquid or malleable material like molten metal, clay, or wet, uncured plaster. The material cools, dries or cures into a harder form and adopts the shape of the hollow interior. A mold may be used many times thus producing multiple objects from a single mold. Each of these multiples is called a cast.
N
Negative
In mold-making the mold is considered to be a negative because it provides an empty space which can produce a cast. It functions like a negative in photography, which can produce a number of prints. Usually a mold can likewise produce a number of casts.
P
Plaster
In sculpture plaster usually refers to plaster of Paris. Plaster begins as a type of rock called gypsum. The manufacturers process gypsum by heating it to change it into plaster. Plaster comes as a white powder, and when it is mixed with water, it re-forms into gypsum. It is often called "Plaster of Paris" because of a large natural gypsum deposit at Montmartre in Paris.
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop artists challenged traditional art ideas by using mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture, such as food labels and movie icons like Marilyn Monroe, as the subject of their work. Andy Warhol is perhaps the most well known pop artist.
Suggested visuals to accompany the definition:
- • Artist: Andy Warhol
- • Artist: Claes Oldenburg
- • Artist: Jasper Johns
Positive
In mold-making the cast produced by a mold is considered a positive because it occupies a physical space and was formed by the negative space of the mold.
S
Sculpture
A sculpture is a three-dimensional artwork created by shaping or combining material, sound, and/or text and or light. Because sculpture can involve the use of materials that can be malleable or molded, it is sometimes called "the plastic arts".
Still Life
A still life is a work of art usually depicting everyday objects in an artificial setting. Objects can be natural and include food, flowers, plants, rocks, shells or man-made like drinking glasses, books, vases, jewelry, coins, pipes, and so on. Still life paintings originated in ancient times and became most popular in Western art since the 17th century. Still life paintings often contain religious and metaphorical symbolism relating to the objects depicted. Some modern still lifes break the two-dimensional barrier and employ three-dimensional mixed media, found objects, photography, computer graphics, as well as video and sound are included.
Suggested visuals to accompany the definition:
- • Still life by Édouard Manet
- • Still life by Vincent Van Gogh
- • Still life by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin
- • Still life by Pablo Picasso
T
Trompe l'œil
Meaning "trick the eye" in French, "trompe l'oeil" refers to an art technique involving extremely realistic imagery in order to create an optical illusion where the depicted object appears to be in three-dimensions. There is a long history of painting using this technique. In architecture, for example, realistic looking windows are painted on walls where no actual windows exist, ceilings are painted to look like they open up to the sky or whole walls are painted to appear like they are not walls but other rooms. Some artists paint "trompe l'oeil" objects on canvas. Often these flat objects, like letters, coins or feathers, will look like the real thing has been pinned to the surface of the painting.
Suggested visuals to accompany the definition:
- • Andrea Pozzo, 17th century ceiling
- • Pere Borell del Caso's painting "Escaping Criticism" from 1874
- • Edward Collier's paintings of objects pinned to a board like feathers, coins, letters
U
Undercut
Most objects have grooves and curves. When making a mold of something, these grooves and curves can cause the object and casts to get stuck in the mold. We call these grooves and curves undercuts. For example, ice cube trays (a basic mold) make ice cubes square so that they can pop out of the tray easily. The ice cubes have no undercuts. However, if ice cubes were shaped like perfect balls, imagine trying to get them out of a tray. They would get stuck because the balls are undercut. Mold makers have different ways of fixing this problem. The most common way is to have a mold come apart in two halves. Imagine an ice cube tray shaped like an egg carton- the "ice balls" could now come out when you opened the tray in half. Other solutions mold makers use is to use a stretchy material for a mold like rubber. This way once the cast hardens, the mold can be stretched to get the cast out.
im the king
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