OCR A-Level Art and Design working across media and disciplines: a complete overview

What this module covers

Art and Design is a practical subject made across a wide range of media and disciplines, and AO2 rewards exploring, selecting and refining them. This module covers the main families: painting and colour media, printmaking, three-dimensional work, and photography and digital media. The transferable skill across all of them is the same: choose a medium or process because its behaviour suits your intention, then control and refine it. This overview ties the four dot-point pages together.

Painting and colour media

Each painting medium has a behaviour you work with, not against. Watercolour is transparent and worked light to dark, reserving the paper's white as highlight. Acrylic is opaque, fast-drying and versatile, worked dark to light. Oil is opaque and slow-drying, allowing subtle blending and glazes. Gouache is opaque and matte; dry media (pastel, coloured pencil) blend directly. The skill is selecting the medium whose properties suit the effect and handling it for its strengths.

Printmaking

Printmaking processes make marks differently and suit AO2 because you can work in states. Relief (lino, woodcut) prints the raised surface for bold graphic marks; intaglio (drypoint, etching) prints incised lines for fine line and tone; screen printing gives flat layered colour; monoprint gives a painterly one-off. The habit that earns marks is taking proofs and refining the image through several states, making the development visible.

Working in three dimensions

Three-dimensional work makes real form in real space. Processes are additive (modelling, construction) or subtractive (carving), plus casting. Real form must be resolved in the round and must physically stand, balance or hang, so you develop it through maquettes and material trials. Critically, 3D work is assessed largely through photographs, so document every stage from several angles in good light.

Photography and digital media

A photograph is authored, not captured: composition, light, viewpoint, focus and exposure are deliberate controls that change meaning without changing the subject. Hard side light dramatises; backlight silhouettes; a low angle makes a subject loom. Work in a series, varying the controls, and review the results. Digital editing and manipulation extend this when used deliberately and acknowledged. Controlled, reviewed authorship earns AO2 and AO3.

Check your knowledge

1. State the working method (light to dark or dark to light) for watercolour and acrylic, and why. (2 marks)
2. Explain the difference between relief and intaglio printing. (2 marks)
3. Why does printmaking suit AO2 especially well? (1 mark)
4. Explain the difference between additive and subtractive 3D processes. (2 marks)
5. Why is documentation essential for three-dimensional work? (1 mark)
6. Name four controls a photographer uses to author an image. (2 marks)