Art vocab: Scraffito

Art vocab: ScraffitoA technique either of wall decor, produced by applying layers of plaster tinted in contrasting

colors to a moistened surface, or

in ceramics by applying two successive layers of contrasting slip to an unfired ceramic body

and then in either case scratching so as to produce an outline drawing.

Serigraphy

Credit is generally given to the artist Andy Warhol for popularizing screen printing identified as serigraphy, in the United States. Warhol is particularly identified with his 1962 depiction of actress Marilyn Monroe screen printed in garish colors.

Sfumato

One of the four canonical painting modes of the Renaissance (It corresponds to the concept of 'low-contrast' in photography. The Italian word sfumato (sfumare, 'to vanish' or 'to shade') captures the idea precisely. The finished product appears as though a veil of smoke had drifted between the subject of the painting and the viewer, adding some brightness to the pure darks and blocking some of the pure brights of the subject.

The painter avoids extreme darks or lights, as the brightness values are grouped more or less tightly

together around middle gray. Sfumato in the Mona Lisa

Holography

A technique that allows the light scattered from an object to be recorded and later reconstructed so that it appears as if the object is in the same position relative to the recording medium as it was when recorded. The image changes as the position and orientation of the viewing system changes in exactly the same way as if the object were still present, thus making the recorded image (hologram) appear three dimentional.

Hologram

Gothic Cathedral

Flying buttresses or arc-boutant, usually on a religious building, used to spread the thrust of a vault across an intervening

space, like an aisle, chapel or cloister, to a

buttress outside the building.

Vaulted Arch – Westminster Palace

• Ribbed vaults, unlike the semi-circular vault of Roman and Romanesque buildings, can be used to roof rectangular and irregularly shaped devices such as trapezoids; vaulting above spaces both large and small is usually supported by richly molded ribs.

Flying buttresses and barrel vaults led to larger windows and stained glass.

Chartres Cathedral (1134-1250)

Curtain-wall: part of a straight wall constructed between two advancing structures, such as bastions, buttresses or piers. In a

fortification it is the weakest element, and in a church it is pierced with large windows, as in a Perpendicular Gothic aisle.

north aisle chapel at Wintringham

COLORS

• Local: true color of an object as seen in normal daylight

• Optical: effect that special lighting has on the object viewed

• Prismatic: the seven colors into which light is resolved when passed through a prism ; primary colors.

Colors

• Arbitrary: use of colors for their emotional or aesthetic impact

• Reflected: The color perceived from an object , determined by the wavelength of the light leaving its surface after selective absorption of other wavelengths of the incident light - the light hitting the surface. Reflected light behaves in certain ways that differentiate it from colors produced by sources of the light.