Artists Technical Terms Explained! - 3rd. Edition
Sanguine can be a drawing, crayon or chalk. There are various different shades it can actually be. Flesh, or an absolute blood red, or a reddish colour. This medium can be used for drawing. It has oxide in the pigment and the content of it is generally chalk or clay. This is also the main colour in Conte crayons. Red chalk, as a term, is the name of the shade.
Sandy Paste works pretty well when using pastels, as it spreads well. The texture of it is gritty and is a sandy coloured acrylic paste which makes for an interesting surface.
Scale really is how you put in proportion the sizing of the dimensions of one thing against another. When drawing to scale, the scale would be the ratio of your drawing to the first drawing. So if you did your drawing to half scale, it would be half the size of your original.
Triptych - Basically this is a set of three paintings which all relate to each other. They can be connected together or hung side by side. Sometimes they are, in fact, hinged together. The central work being the main subject with the other paintings flanking either side of it. These can be mounted on a sort of platform affair and sometimes they are like carvings.
Diptych - A set of two pictures which often can be united in the centre, or if you prefer it, they can be hung with a gap between them. Polytych, on the same theme, only with four or five works of art.
Automatic Drawing, which can also be called automation. An interesting form of drawing, as with this you use your pencil or brush without really thinking about it. Probably first used by Surrealists who did not really conform to traditional methods as it allowed them more freedom of expression.
Many fantastic paintings were created like this, often leaning towards Abstract Expressionism.
Graphite - Years ago this was used for writing, by using small lumps of it, which were attached to a stick. It is a form of carbon, which is a grey or black. At one time it was called black lead and to this day some pencils are not properly labelled and are still being sold as lead pencils. The pencils themselves are a mixture of graphite and clay.
Conte crayons are a mixture of clay with graphite. These have variants which will produce differences in the degrees of hardness. These crayons date back to the 18th Century.
They are a bit like chalk, but slightly greasy, so they do not crumble as much. Available usually in a few colours, namely brown, black and a red. These are used for drawing. Conte invented the modern graphite pencils, but when he was young he was a portrait painter.
