Art Appreciation

In art appreciation right now, we are learning about the various media of design. Everything from drawing to sculpture. So far we've gone over printmaking and drawing. Drawing is one that pretty much everyone already knows. I know a lot of these different media anyway, because I took art in high school and we used a lot of these media. Some of the types of drawing we learned about were chalk, charcoal, and brush and ink. I already knew a good bit about chalk and charcoal drawings, however I did not know much about brush and ink. Brush and ink is a more eastern way drawing. Not to many western artist use it because it is so complex and it does not allow you to erase. Eastern artists on the other hand love this form of drawing. It's as easy for them as drawing with a pencil is for us. The reason for this being that brush and ink was how eastern cultures use to write everything.
Yesterday we learned about a new type of media called printmaking. I did not know much about this media because I had only ever done a woodcut print. It turned out that there are four other types of printmaking than this that I had never heard of. Woodcut or linocut are pretty simple, you cut out the pieces you don't want to show up in the artwork and leave the rest to transfer the ink. Once you get done carving, all you have to do is roll ink over the top and then press and pull a piece of paper on it. I did not know however that if you wanted different colors, you had to make a different matrix for each color. I also didn't know artist would cut an X through the matrix so no other prints could be made.