OCR A-Level Art and Design developing a personal style overview quiz quiz

A single stylistic decision made right at the end of the project, just before submission

Closely copying the surface style of one favourite artist across every page of the sketchbook

Buying better and more expensive materials so that the finished outcomes simply look more polished

Sustained analytical influence, consistent decisions, and reflection on what feels authentic

AO4 rewards a 'personal and meaningful response'; competence is only the floor, not the top band

Personal work is simply faster to produce, so it lets a candidate fill more pages in the time given

Technically competent work is explicitly banned by the OCR specification and is penalised by moderators

There is no real difference between competent work and a personal response in the eyes of the marker

Competent work is simply made on a larger scale, while a personal response is always produced on smaller sheets of paper

Competent work is accomplished but anonymous; a personal response carries a recognisable voice and consistent personal decisions

A personal response deliberately uses no technical skill at all, relying instead purely on raw and untrained self-expression

They are essentially the same thing, since any technically accomplished piece of work counts automatically as a personal response

By closely imitating one favourite artist's style until your own work looks almost identical to theirs

By deliberately avoiding all outside influence and refusing to study the work of any other artists at all

By analytical influence: transforming principles from several artists, developed on your own concerns

By carefully tracing existing artworks so that the proportions and the composition come out exactly right

Working far too fast and rushing every page from the outset

Studying and referencing too many different artists at once

Annotating the pages far too heavily and at excessive length

Stalling into safe repetition after a strong start

Risk-taking and refinement

Working speed and neat presentation

Use of colour and overall tone

Scale of work and page count

You happened to finish the whole project earlier than expected

You can predict exactly what your next ten pages will look like

You worked in only one medium throughout the entire project

You added some written annotation to every single page of the work

Presentation is not assessed at all; only the quality of the finished artwork itself earns any marks

Only neat handwriting in the annotations matters, since that is the single thing a moderator looks at

AO4 awards presentation, and the development and all four objectives must be visible to a moderator

Good presentation entirely replaces the artwork, so a well laid-out folder needs little actual work

Including absolutely every page exactly in the order it happened to be made, with nothing whatsoever left out at all

Submitting only the single final outcome and leaving out all of the supporting development work entirely

Removing all of the written annotation so that the artwork on each page is allowed to speak for itself

Selecting the work that shows development best, sequencing it, presenting it cleanly, and annotating purposefully

The portfolio is judged as a whole, so the development and objectives must be visible; unselected, disordered work hides them

It does not really matter at all how the work is selected or ordered, because moderators always assess each piece in complete isolation

Markers only ever look closely at the very first page of a folder, so the order of everything that follows is irrelevant

The sequence in which pages are placed physically affects the colour and tone that a moderator perceives in each piece

Left out of the portfolio entirely because it cannot be shown

Photographed well, from several angles, in good light

Described only in words, with no visual record provided at all

Drawn from memory afterwards rather than photographed directly

That it contains the largest possible number of pages of work

That it makes use of the most expensive and highest-quality art media available

That all four objectives are clearly evidenced and easy for a moderator to find

That it copies the style of a famous artist as closely as it possibly can