Report Guidelines for Digital Image Making.

Here are a variety of helps and tips to aid you in writing about art and artists. The Library at RMCAD has a great deal of helps and tips online at their main page. Visit that page for more helps and tips.

At the library web site, click on Categories, and under that tab you will find alphabetically arranged topics. Some helpful topics are 1. Writing Guide links, 2. Citations Research links, and 3. Info. Lit. Research links.

Following is a set of guidelines that I have paraphrased from the book, "Writing about art," second edition, by Henry M. Sayre. Please read the book for more guidance, as this is just a summary. The book is in the library at RMCAD.

Ways to think about approach to your writing:

1. Sociological: the writing is about people and their surroundings, their relationships to each other, how their work is affected by their economical, political, and religious status. When you write about art and/or artists, this type of writing is about relationships and how they affect the art, or about how the art affects the world around it.

2. Biographical: the writing is a chronology of the artist and his/her work, and how it all progresses throughout the life of the artist.

3. Iconographical: the writing is about the art and its symbolic content or meaning.

4. Formal analysis: the writing is about the formal aspects of the art - the elements of art, the principles of design, color relationships, compositional elements, etc.

Analysis: a separating into parts in order to understand the whole.

Subject matter versus content and meaning (look at the definitions of the words in our blog design vocabulary section).

Ask these questions of the work:
1. What is my response to the work?
2. When and where was the work made?
3.Under what circumstances would the work originally have been seen?
4. What purpose did the work serve?
5.What is the title of the work?
6. In what condition has the work survived?

Formal analysis of a work of art: "a formal analysis of a work of art is analysis of the form the artist produces, that is, an analysis of the work of art, which is made up of such things as line, shape, color, texture." (page 50)

Note: feelings and opinions should always be based on fact and evidence when possible. Many people critique artwork and have certain feelings about the art without knowing why they like or do not like the work. There is nothing wrong with that, but as a college student building a vocabulary and belief system about art, you should be challenging yourself fresh every day to be a professional.

Consider comparison/contrasting artists and/or art. For example, how does a watercolor painter today compare and contrast with Dutch painters?

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