The 12 Art Techniques Every Artist Should Know
People keep asking for "the 12 art techniques" like there's one official list. There isn't, but there is a working set of methods that turn up again and again across drawing, painting, and printmaking. Here they are, with examples.
Search "what are the 12 art techniques used by artists" and you'll find a dozen lists that don't agree with each other. That's because no museum or art board ever ratified a canonical twelve. What does exist is a cluster of methods that show up constantly in studios, classrooms, and gallery wall texts. I've pulled the twelve that earn their place, the ones you'll actually see named in a painting's condition report or a drawing teacher's syllabus.
Some of these are drawing techniques, some are painting, a couple cross over. I'll tell you what each one is, what it's good for, and a concrete example so the word isn't just floating there.
1. Hatching and cross-hatching
You build tone with parallel lines. Pack them tighter for darker areas, spread them out for lighter ones. Cross-hatching layers a second set of lines at an angle over the first to deepen the shadow. Albrecht Dürer's engravings are the textbook case: look at the modeling on a face in Melencolia I (1514) and you're seeing thousands of crossed lines doing the work a smudge would do in charcoal.
It's slow and it rewards patience. A single square inch of dense cross-hatching can take ten minutes. The payoff is control, because you decide exactly where every value sits.
2. Stippling
Tone made from dots instead of lines. More dots, denser dots, darker area. Pen-and-ink illustrators and scientific draftsmen love it because it reads cleanly when reproduced small. The downside is brutal labor; a detailed stippled drawing can run into the hundreds of thousands of individual marks. Pointillism in painting, which I'll get to, is stippling's flashy cousin.
3. Scumbling and blending
Blending is the soft graduation between values, the thing most beginners reach for first with a tortillon or a fingertip on graphite. Scumbling is its scribbled, circular version: small overlapping loops that fill an area with even tone. If you've ever shaded a sphere in a foundation class and been told to keep your pencil moving in tight circles, that was scumbling. It's faster than hatching and hides individual strokes, which is why it suits smooth surfaces like skin or polished metal.
Where these four sit together
Hatching, stippling, scumbling, and blending are the core value-building methods in drawing. I broke them down further in the seven main drawing techniques, with reference images, if you want to see the marks up close.
4. Gesture drawing
Fast, loose drawing that captures movement and weight before detail. Life-drawing classes typically open with 30-second and one-minute poses precisely to force gesture. You're not drawing the model's hand, you're drawing the line of energy running from shoulder to hip. Animators at studios like Disney built whole training programs around it because a character has to read as alive in a single pose.
5. Chiaroscuro
Italian for light-dark. It's the dramatic modeling of form through strong contrast between illuminated and shadowed areas. Caravaggio pushed it to an extreme called tenebrism, where figures emerge from near-total blackness lit by a single hard source. The National Gallery in London describes his Supper at Emmaus as a scene where light does the storytelling, snapping Christ into focus while the disciples react in the gloom.
Chiaroscuro is technically a use of value rather than a single tool, but artists name it as a technique because choosing to light a subject this way changes everything about how you build the picture.
6. Sgraffito
Scratching through a top layer to reveal what's underneath. In painting, you drag the wooden end of a brush through wet paint to expose the color below. In ceramics, you carve through colored slip to the clay body. Picasso scratched into wet oil constantly. It's a way to put line back into a painting without picking up a pencil, and it leaves a physical groove you can see in raking light.
7. Impasto
Thick paint applied so it stands off the surface, holding the mark of the brush or palette knife. Van Gogh is the obvious reference: the swirls in The Starry Night are ridges of paint you could read like braille. Impasto catches real light and casts tiny shadows, so the surface keeps changing as you move past it. Frank Auerbach took it further, building portraits where the paint sits half an inch proud of the canvas.
8. Glazing
The opposite of impasto in spirit. You lay thin, transparent layers of paint over a dried layer below, so light passes through the top and bounces back off the bottom. The result is a glowing depth you can't mix on a palette. Renaissance and Baroque painters built flesh tones this way, layering warm and cool transparent films. Jan van Eyck's reds get their jewel quality from glazing, not from one opaque stroke.
It demands patience because each layer has to dry first. Oil glazing a portrait properly can mean ten or more sessions spread over weeks.
9. Wet-on-wet (alla prima)
Painting into still-wet paint, blending colors directly on the surface and finishing in a single session before anything dries. Bob Ross made it famous on television, but the Impressionists treated it as serious practice; Monet often finished a canvas outdoors in one sitting to catch a passing effect of light. It's immediate and forgiving in some ways, unforgiving in others, because you can muddy your colors fast if you overwork them.
10. Pointillism (and divisionism)
Small distinct dots of pure color placed side by side, left for the viewer's eye to blend at a distance. Georges Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884 to 1886) is around ten feet wide and made of countless dabs; stand close and it's confetti, step back and it resolves into a riverbank afternoon. The theory behind it came partly from color science of the period, the idea that mixing light optically gives a brighter result than mixing pigment on a palette.
If the color reasoning interests you, I walked through how artists actually use the wheel in color theory basics, including why optical mixing behaves differently from physical mixing.
11. Collage and mixed media
Building an image from pasted materials: paper, fabric, photographs, found objects. Braque and Picasso invented papier collé around 1912, gluing newspaper and wallpaper into their Cubist still lifes. A century later it's everywhere, and the line between collage and assemblage and digital compositing has gotten thin. Plenty of working artists today combine cut paper with paint, ink, and scanned texture in one piece. The art and design magazine Colossal regularly features artists pushing collage into sculpture and installation, which is a good reminder that the technique stopped being a flat-paper exercise a long time ago.
12. Printmaking
This is really a family of techniques, but it earns a slot because so much historical image-making happened through it. The main branches:
- Relief (woodcut, linocut): you cut away what you don't want and ink the raised surface. Hokusai's Great Wave is a woodblock print, one of many impressions, not a unique painting.
- Intaglio (etching, engraving): the image sits in grooves cut or bitten below the surface; ink fills the grooves and the flat surface is wiped clean. Rembrandt's etchings live here.
- Lithography: based on grease repelling water, printed from a flat stone or plate. Toulouse-Lautrec's posters are lithographs.
- Screenprinting: ink pushed through a stencil on mesh. Warhol's Marilyns.
Printmaking matters because it made images repeatable and cheap centuries before photography, which is partly why printed art shaped popular culture so heavily. The Met's online collection holds tens of thousands of prints, and you can trace the same biblical scene through dozens of artists' plates across two hundred years.
So what are the 12 types of art, then?
This is the question people often mean when they search the technique keyword, and it's a different question. "Types of art" usually points to categories or disciplines: painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, photography, architecture, ceramics, textiles, film, performance, digital art, and installation. That's a clean dozen if you want one, though again no committee blessed it. Wikipedia's entry on the arts groups things into visual arts, performing arts, and literary arts, which cuts the pie differently and shows how arbitrary any fixed number is.
What about the 12 art movements?
Movements are historical, not technical. A reasonable twelve, roughly in order: Renaissance, Baroque, Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, and Contemporary. Each carries its own preferred techniques; Impressionists leaned on wet-on-wet, Pop artists on screenprinting. I get into why these labels still matter, even if you never set foot in a gallery, in this piece on art movements.
And the 13 art styles people ask about?
Styles overlap heavily with movements but tend to describe a look rather than a period: abstract, figurative, expressionist, photorealist, naive, surreal, and so on. The "13" you see floating around is just one blogger's list someone else copied. Don't lose sleep over the exact count.
How to actually learn these
Pick one technique and spend a week on only that. Twelve techniques learned shallowly will leave you frustrated; one technique drilled until your hand stops fighting you will change how you see the next eleven. Most people start with hatching or blending because the materials cost almost nothing, a pencil and paper, and the feedback is instant.
If your goal is painting, glazing and wet-on-wet teach you the two opposite ways oil and acrylic behave, slow and patient versus fast and committed. Doing both early tells you which temperament fits you.
For studying technique in finished work, slow looking beats reading. Stand in front of a painting (or a high-resolution scan) and name what you're seeing: is that shadow hatched or blended, is the paint thick or thin, are the colors mixed on the canvas or sitting side by side? That habit of describing before judging is the whole basis of the Google "Say What You See" exercise, and it trains your eye faster than any list of definitions.
The number twelve is a convenient hook for a search box. The real value is knowing what each method does to a surface and why an artist would reach for it. Once you can look at The Starry Night and say "that's impasto, and the sky is half wet-on-wet," you've stopped memorizing terms and started reading paintings. Go scratch a line through some wet paint and watch what happens.