Annotation that earns marks
Art & Design · GCSE · The School
Three questions, every time
WHY did you try this? WHAT happened? WHAT NEXT? Three sentences answering those beat a paragraph describing the picture, because the picture is already there. If a sentence you have written is still true when the reader covers the image, it is probably annotation; if it becomes meaningless, it was a caption.
Name the thing you were testing
Work that tests something can be judged; work that merely happened cannot. "Testing whether a dry brush holds the brick texture better than a wash" gives the marker a question your page answers. It also gives YOU one, which is the harder benefit — a page made to answer a question comes out better than a page made to fill a spread.
A failure, annotated, is an asset
Assessment rewards development, and development is visible in what did not work. A muddy wash with "too much water and I went back in before it dried, so the colours mixed on the paper — next page, let each layer dry and test on scrap first" is stronger evidence than a clean page with nothing written on it. Removing your failures removes the reason the successes count.
THE PAGE: three small studies of the same railing, in pencil, biro and ink wash. CAPTIONED: "Three studies of a railing. Pencil, biro and ink wash. I like the biro one." That is three sentences that tell the marker nothing they cannot see, plus an opinion. ANNOTATED: "Testing which medium holds the rust texture. PENCIL: too even, the rust disappears. BIRO: builds up in layers and the pitting reads, but it cannot go light again once dark. INK WASH: the corrosion reads at a distance and vanishes close up. Taking biro forward for the close study and wash for the wide one, and trying biro over a wash to get both." Same page, same time spent. One of them evidences a decision, a result and a next step — and the last sentence is a plan, which is what the next page will be.