what to include in artist research gcse

Teaching Resource

Research skills and exam support

Designed to inspire ideas for research in the gallery, classroom and everyday life

About How to Research

Research brief, how do artists research, example discussion points and activities.

This resource was developed to offer creative research strategies to support a broad range of Art & Design curriculums for GCSE, BTech, and A-Level students.

How to Research models how artists can carry out research, with a specific focus on writing, drawing and looking. We invited three artists to respond to a project brief, providing prompts that encouraged them to draw connections between their particular thinking and approach to research, and their art-making practice.

The contents page of each booklet details this brief, encompassing methods of writing personal responses and collecting images and inspirations to compile research files; your students can discover new ways of approaching these tasks through the artists’ responses. We have also included discussion points and activities throughout the booklets, prompting students to further their research in their own ways.

Donald Rodney's sketchbook (Tate Archive ref: TGA 200321)

Used with permission

This activity invites your class to build research files of their own, gathering and developing their ideas to support their ongoing coursework. The prompts provide a framework that you can adapt in numerous ways, acknowledging your expertise in best supporting your pupils’ needs.

Ask your students to each find the following:

• An image of something they already have, that they currently use to made art
• An image of their own artwork
• An image of an artwork from the Tate collection that inspires them
• A quote or textual reference that inspires them

Then, challenge them to respond to the following questions, through writing, annotation, drawing, making, or more.

• What connections can they find between the images and texts they’ve chosen?
• Explain a process they use to help them process ideas and inspirations.
• What question would they ask an artist about their research? Which artist(s) would they ask it to?

Encourage your students to collect all the work they produce through this project in a sketchbook or folder. Where could they go next? How might this research influence their own artmaking?

Image from Drawing as Research  

© Sovay Berriman

Drawing As Research

Go for a walk. As you are walking, think of a question or a problem you are trying to resolve in your art and see if you can generate any new answers. Does the physical process of walking stimulate your thought process in the same way it does Berriman’s?

Make a drawing that explores your original question or problem, and any new ideas generated. Think about how you might relate this drawing to any other drawing, or artwork, you have made previously. Use this connection to make a new work, and so on. Record the connection between the works as you go.

By walking to produce ideas, Berriman might be considered to be engaging with a ‘non-art’ process to generate art. Are there any non-art processes that help you think through ideas, and if a non-art process generates ideas for artworks, is it still a non-art process?

Looking As Research

Take a photograph of a photograph, either on a screen or a printed picture. What do you see now that you couldn’t see in the original image? What happens if you repeat this process – how does the actual photograph itself (not what it is picturing) start to become visible, and is this interesting to you? How do you identify what is of interest to you?

How quickly do your interests change? Can you map out your changing interests through artworks/artists you have been drawn do? What can you learn from your map about the way that you are currently looking at art and what questions does the map raise for you?

Writing As Research

Get a pile of Post-It notes, record cards or just small scraps of paper. On each separate Post-It, card or piece of paper write down one of the ideas that you are currently working with in an essay, an artwork you are making, or just things you are thinking about. These can be quotations, single words that come to mind, questions, names and anything else you can think of. Stick them up on the wall in a way that makes sense to you. What new relations have formed? Leave them up overnight, or for a longer period of time, and then come back and rearrange them. How does this reordering change the meaning of the words? What new relations have formed? Write down new words or ideas that come to mind and add them to the wall.

This can be repeated for a week, a month, a year…

Use your Post-It wall as a starting point for other forms of writing; poems, lists, stories, scripts, descriptions… Now use someone else’s Post-It wall to do the same.

How to Research booklets are also available to pick up at the Schools Desk at Tate Britain and Tate Modern.

To further support your students at exam time see our Exam Help pages for more ideas and inspiration.

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• Teaching Resources
• Gcse Art Final Piece Resource

GCSE art final piece – Examples, guidance & advice

Word docs and PowerPoint

These five art GCSE final piece resources will support students to create an impressive project.

• FINE ART – Guidance on how to write effective contextual studies and critical responses to examples of fine art.
• ANALYSIS – A PowerPoint of good and excellent examples of AO1 critical understanding / artist analysis pages.
• GRAPHICS – Advice on how to present successful contextual studies and critical responses to examples of illustration and graphic design.
• PHOTOGRAPHY – Suggestions on what’s required to produce contextual studies and critical responses to photography, in a way that satisfies the GCSE art assessment criteria.
• BETTER WORDS – A list of suggested alternative words that will get students more points (eg ‘create/develop/produce’ instead of ‘do/doing’

GCSE art final piece advice for teachers

As art teachers, we’re all familiar with the arc of a project. More often than not, we start with artist research and finish with an artwork, or collection of pieces that show the student’s journey from initial investigation to a personal conclusion.

With these two elements regularly bookending a project, then, the pressure on them to hold the work together is paramount. Here are some ideas to make sure they do just that.

First, let’s get rid of the idea that students always need to look at ‘artists’. Yes, they normally do (it makes sense), but I prefer to use the term ‘influences’. For us, this switch in language led to a new openness in seeing how varied artistic traditions, not at first obviously related, could inform one another.

British artist Polly Morgan points out the need to not ‘restrict yourself to your own medium’. It’s just as possible to be inspired by a filmmaker, fashion designer, writer or friend than another artist.”

Her contemporary, Isaac Julien, has much the same idea: “I have a magpie attitude to inspiration. It’s about taking all the little everyday things and observing them with a critical eye; building up a scrapbook which you can draw on.”

To help our students develop an understanding of breadth, we have a 10-point independent learning list, into which we encourage them to dip each week. This may or may not feed back directly into their work, but helps them develop a much more rounded understanding of the arts.

GCSE art form and structure

Next, let’s consider structure. It’s important to understand that we’re not here to create historical documents. Biographical information is useful only if it informs our understanding.

For example, we don’t need to know how many children a person had, but we may want to know what their relationships were like if their work is directly related to the experience of family life. Added to that, the cost of artwork is irrelevant.

The fact that someone may have paid several millions for a piece is not an indicator of its value – not in artistic or cultural terms, anyway.

Each artist has a range of interests, experiences and perspectives. From this, we want to know the aim of their art practice. Let’s take for example Käthe Kollwitz, a German, born in Kaliningrad, who lived from 1867 to 1945. These are useful facts. They tell us she lived in a place and time when the world was at war.

Her city of birth was a strange geographical example of detachment; a part of Russia, separated from its motherland by Poland and Lithuania. As such, we can guess she was interested in the effects of war and in belonging. But can we find evidence?

Here is where quotes from the artist can be helpful. The MoMA website starts its section on Kollwitz with her quote “I felt that I have no right to withdraw from the responsibility of being an advocate. It is my duty to voice the sufferings of men.”

So now we know where and when she lived. We know what was happening socially and politically at the time, and that her aim for her work was to make clear the suffering experienced.

GCSE art themes

Research undertaken, let’s now start to observe. Here is where the formal elements come in.

Look at her colours, use of line, compositions. Do they, as she lays out they should, tell of man’s suffering? Do students believe she has achieved what she set out to do? Why? Is it through her use of visual isolation, the individual surrounded by the white space of the paper?

Perhaps the fracturedness with which she used a pencil; the intense focus on the human face?

Linking facts, quotes and observations steeped in an understanding of the formal elements is needed to ensure a written piece has the depth required to show true engagement with the work.

This understanding becomes the diving board for the student’s own work. Once they know ‘what’, ‘how’ and ‘why’, they can apply this to their own piece.

What causes them anguish? What do they want to portray so others can see? Have they thought about what marks they will make to convey the urgency they feel?

This is why we research: not to copy, but to give ourselves an understanding and language for our own artwork’s aims.

In fact, the assessment objectives do not state that all research must be written. Any real investigation of an influence must be deeply practical, too. In order for students to develop ideas through investigation or show an understanding of critical sources, their creative response is central.

Sketchbook ideas

Yes, AO1 focuses on research, but this research should permeate all the way through to A04.

A GCSE art final piece on its own is worth nothing. It might feel like the Big Daddy; but we all know that the bulk of the marks come from AO1-3, and that unless the outcome sits firmly within the preceding investigations, it has little value.

The assessment criteria asks for a ‘purposeful and meaningful response’. In order for any pieces that come at the end to achieve this, they must be a response to the work in the sketchbook, showing development from initial ideas, and a refinement of both thought and practice.

One of the challenges I face is when students propose a GCSE art final piece, rather than an area of investigation right from the start. So, in order to keep projects open – to ensure experimentation and exploration is genuine – we remove any specific final piece planning.

Instead, we focus on an arena of interest, laying down specifics only when initial investigative and experimental work is complete.

In reality, the only difference between the GCSE art final piece and the rest of the submission is how it consolidates the journey. The body of work that precedes it is there to help students find interesting connections and surprising new pathways that can then be narrowed down. Any particular approaches used in a final piece need to be evidenced in that preceding work.

I will end with this: that while I believe, as do those I have spoken to, that exam boards and moderators have favourite styles or types of outcomes, the student’s strengths and interests must win out.

When I was once asked at interview to name a favourite artist, my answer was simple – that it didn’t matter. It was finding the creative influences that were right for the students that should be my aim.

I stand by that, and hope that all art teachers would, too.

Writing checklist

Five pointers for better-written analysis…

• Remove any biographical information that’s not relevant.
• Watch out for commonly used weak words and provide students with alternatives. The ‘Better Words’ sheet at the top of this page can help you get started.
• Find quotes from respected art critics. Include them and explain what they mean. Many media outlines charge for their online content, but The Guardian and the BBC’s arts coverage can be accessed for free.
• Make sure students explain any tricky terminology they use and any key ideas for art movements they mention.
• Consider adjusting writing guides for different art practices. Some points of focus will vary according to the medium.

Hannah Day is head of art, media and film at  Ludlow College . Lucy Wilding is head of art at Lacon Child School, Shropshire . Download a free GCSE art sketchbook resource .

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• Cover/sub lesson
• Women artists
• Contemporary artists
• Scheme of Work
• Literacy in art

‘How to do Artist Research’: new worksheet

• by AMIMAMIM
• November 6, 2019 April 8, 2020

I’ve created a straightforward guide to Artist Research aimed at KS4 students. It provides a clear template for presenting investigations into other artists work in an appropriate way, and to a high standard.

Using this worksheet frequently will get students in the habit of presenting excellent artist research. And you can use the handout at KS3 and KS5, depending on the ability of your groups.

On the first page of the worksheet, students fill-in the information they find from various sources. In addition to the boxes to complete, there are prompts to encourage relevant responses. The second page gives 20 questions to prompt thoughtful analysis.

I’ve avoided generic questions that tend to produce banal answers. Instead the second page of the worksheet provides thought provoking questions. For example: “What is the most important thing about the artwork? Why do you think this?” How big is the artwork? Does this effect the impact of the work on the viewer? How?” “Is there anything strange or shocking?” This resource is available through TES ( click here ) or TpT ( click here ), or you can download by clicking the image above, or visiting my resources shop .

I have plenty more resources available to download which support artist research: poster to widen and improve vocabulary artist research poster to display bookmark infographic with artist research steps

In addition, you may also be interested in my worksheets on various artists. These provide information as well as written and practical activities in response to their work; more about them here . They make great handouts for cover work, extension activities, whole class or homework…

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Find, Find, Choose – Artist Research Hunt

I want to pay in australian dollars ($) canadian dollars ($) euros (€) pound sterling (£) new zealand dollar ($) us dollars ($) south african rand change currency, description.

Artist Research Hunt!  Ideal for home learning.

This two-page art resource asks students to search for artists on the internet.  There are 9 groups of artists they need to collect.  For example 10 artist who paint portraits, 9 artists who paint landscapes, and then it counts down, 8, 7, 6 etc, asking students to find different sorts of artists. Students are asked to send you these lists of artists.  Wow!  They will have looked at so much art.  Finally, it asks students to choose 1 artwork that they like the best and create a research page on it.  It asks them to include facts about the artist, a description of the artwork and why they chose it.  A good example of a research page is include which you can see pictured above.  I would give students 2 lessons to complete this.

There are lots of resources on The Arty Teacher that ask students to analyse art.

The Arty Teacher

Sarah Crowther is The Arty Teacher. She is a high school art teacher in the North West of England. She strives to share her enthusiasm for art by providing art teachers around the globe with high-quality resources and by sharing her expertise through this blog.

By The Arty Teacher on July 23, 2020 at 5:51 am

Hi Jenny, Thank you for taking the time to leave a review. I'm sorry you feel that the resource is overpriced. When I delivered this lesson to my students as a home learning task, they came back to me with fantastic lists of artists and were able to talk to me about artists they liked over zoom. They then went on to create a research page on their favourite painting (this is what the resource asks them to do) and included the information that was asked for, and using the provided good example for inspiration. Completing this task took them two lessons. The description of the resource states that it is a two-page resource. If there is any way I can improve the description, please let me know. A majority of the lessons on my website are £3/$3. For even better value I can recommend subscribing because when you do you can download 10 resources a month very cheaply. https://theartyteacher.com/downloads/10-resources-a-month-for-year/

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I set up The Arty Teacher because I have a passion for my subject that I want to share with other art teachers around the world.

I have been a high school art teacher for over 20 years, so I understand what it’s like to be in front of a class of students, often with very different abilities and attitudes.

I wanted to develop resources that would help teachers to bring out the best in every student in every class. I also wanted to free-up staff from time-consuming lesson preparation to let them focus instead on delivering exciting, motivating, dynamic lessons, supported by excellent resources.

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Report showcases digital transformation underway at UC

Improvements include new state-of-the-art 911 system.

Digital Technology Solutions released its annual report for 2023-24 highlighting the many ways the University of Cincinnati is meeting the needs and protecting the security of students, faculty and staff. 

The 2023-24 report looks back at key milestones that support the university’s digital transformation goals to increase IT operational excellence, bolster cybersecurity and resiliency, and modernize IT infrastructure and systems.

The report also showcases examples of digital transformation already happening at the university.

Highlights include:

• 911 Transformation:  UC rolled out a new, state-of-the-art 911 system in 2024 that will help improve emergency response times on campus and can help support the safety of the surrounding local community.
• AI Symposium:  A day-long event at Tangeman University Center explored topics around AI in education, learning technologies, research, innovation, ethics, policy, and social impact. Presentations included keynotes from UC’s Dr. Kelly Cohen and former Synchrony Financial Chief Technology Officer Greg Simpson as well as 16 breakout sessions led by UC students, faculty, and staff.  
• Bearcats Health App:  The app uses optical character recognition and artificial intelligence features to securely scan, digitize, and validate required student immunization and screening records.

“Digital transformation happens when people, processes, and technology come together on behalf of our purpose—student success,” said UC Vice President & Chief Digital Officer Bharath Prabhakaran. “DTS’s partnerships with UC students, faculty, and staff will continue to help accelerate Next Lives Here at UC.”

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UC to host university-wide shred event

June 2, 2023

The next shred event is planned for Thursday, June 22, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on the Commons parking lot behind A&S Hall.

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GCSE Artist research templates

Subject: Art and design

Age range: 14-16

Resource type: Lesson (complete)

Last updated

9 June 2024

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Use the powerpoints and worksheets provided to help guide GCSE students with their initial artist research - how to do it, how to design and layout the page and how to develop their ideas through artist research.

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