Home » Visual & Performing Arts » Illustration/Illumination » It's the Style! No, It's the Technique!

It's the Style! No, It's the Technique!

© Suzanne Hill

In this article we will be exploring style and technique. These terms are often used interchangeably in discussions of art. To ensure that we have a common understanding I want to explore and define the concepts. Briefly, technique refers to an artist's choice of media and the way the media are applied, while style refers to the visual end result.

In discussing style and technique, we will look at these three paintings, examples of the female figure with rather different looks:
1. Invocation, by Lord Frederic Leighton
2. At The Theater, by Mary Cassatt
3. The Black Cape, by Aubrey Beardsley

I highly recommend opening three browsers separate from the one containing this article--one for each of the three following URLs. It will be less frustrating to keep these open to refer to among the separate windows than to briefly jump to hyper-links that will fill this space and replace the article. I don't want to lose you. So if you feel comfortable doing so, open three more browsers and cut and paste each URL into the Go To or Address spot.

1. www.artmagick.com/paintings/leighton/leighton10.jpg
(Lord Frederic Leighton's Invocation found at the ArtMagick Web site)

2. metalab.unc.edu/wm/paint/auth/cassatt/theater.jpg
(Mary Cassatt's At The Theater at the WebMuseum Paris Web site)

3. www.esotericart.com/fringe/art/symbolic/Beardsley/Black-CapeL.html
(Aubrey Beardsley's The Black Cape at Esoteric Art)

If you are having problems at this point, email me, or forget the effort and rest easy. The links will be provided below and you will have the ability to hyper-link out for brief glimpses at the artwork.

Now, let's briefly cover technique. Technique refers to the manner and the ability with which an artist employs the technical skills of his particular art. It is a method of performing or a way of accomplishing his work. He may use pencil applied to bristol board - depending on the force used on the pencil, he could end up with a strong, dynamic, vigorous, roughly constructed drawing or a delicately detailed one. The manner in which the media are applied determines the end result - and thus the style.

By media, we mean pencil in many degrees of hardness with different amounts of pressure; pastel, chalk, and conte; pen and ink with crosshatch and stipple to add tone gradations and texture; ink wash in varying tone gradations; watercolor, tempera, gouache; scratchboard; montage (two-dimensional) or collage (three-dimensional); linoleum cuts and relief transfer prints; monotype; and oil/acrylic.

The media can be used with different amounts of pressure or using different strokes, points, tips, or nibs for various effects on countless finishes, surfaces, papers, cloths, and boards. I will explore media in other articles, and only plan to mention them briefly here to show that there are endless combinations, and it is the choices made and applications used that determine the artist's end result. Our main emphasis is on introducing the three aforementioned pieces of art to begin to get a feel for style.