Educerie · IB Diploma · Visual Arts
Task 1 — The art-making inquiries portfolio
The portfolio is the record of your investigation. It is the largest single piece of evidence about how you work, and it is the task most often damaged by being left too late.
What an inquiry actually is
An inquiry is a question you are working on, pursued through making rather than through writing. It has three properties:
- It is genuinely open. "How can I paint a portrait?" has a known answer. "How much of a face can be removed before it stops being read as a face?" does not.
- It can be answered by making. Not every good question can. "Is photography art?" is a seminar question; "does printing the same image on fabric and on paper change how viewers handle it?" is a studio one.
- It survives contact with material. Most first inquiries do not, and that is fine — the portfolio should show it changing, with reasons.
Weak inquiries are usually topics, not questions: identity, nature, war. A topic tells you what to depict. A question tells you what to find out. If your inquiry can be satisfied by making a picture of something, it is a topic.
What goes in the portfolio
Think of it as evidence in four kinds, interleaved rather than separated:
Experiments. Material tests, technique trials, compositional studies. Each needs a caption saying what you were testing and what happened — not "acrylic on board" but "testing whether a thicker ground would stop the ink bleeding; it did, but killed the line quality I wanted".
Research and influences. Specific works by specific artists, with what you took from them and what you rejected. Include non-art sources where relevant: a medical illustration, a family photograph, a piece of architecture.
Technical development. The same skill shown at intervals so growth is visible.
Reflection. Short, frequent, decision-bearing. Written at the time.
Documenting failure, which is the part people skip
A failed experiment is stronger evidence of inquiry than a successful one, because it shows judgement being exercised. What the assessment wants is not that everything worked; it is that you could tell the difference and act on it.
Document failure in three steps:
- What you tried, specifically enough to be repeatable.
- What actually happened, described rather than judged. "The glaze crazed across the shoulder" is more useful than "it went wrong".
- What you did next, and why. This is the mark-bearing step. A failure with no consequence is just a bad outcome; a failure that redirects the work is inquiry.
A portfolio where nothing ever fails reads as assembled afterwards, and assessors have seen many of them.
Using influences properly
The difference between influence and copying is transformation with a stated purpose.
Weak: reproducing an artist's image with minor changes and captioning it "inspired by".
Strong: identifying one specific quality of a specific work — a palette restriction, a way of cropping, a surface treatment, an attitude to the viewer — testing it against your own subject, and reporting what happened. Often what happened is that it did not transfer, and saying so is better evidence than a successful pastiche.
Always name the work, not just the artist, and not the movement. "Cubism" tells an assessor nothing about what you looked at.
Reflection that counts
Compare:
Not reflection. "I really like how this turned out. I think it is one of my best pieces."
Not reflection. "This did not work very well."
Reflection. "The figure reads as floating because I lost the cast shadow when I lightened the ground. I want the ambiguity but not the weightlessness, so in the next piece I will keep the lighter ground and reintroduce contact shadow only where the figure meets the edge."
The test is simple: does a decision follow from it? If nothing changes as a result, it is a caption, not reflection.
Write reflection at the time. Retrospective reflection is recognisable because it is tidy, and tidiness is the opposite of what this task is evidence of.
Working practice
Photograph everything, immediately. Work in progress, failed states, the studio floor. You cannot document a stage after you have painted over it, and students lose whole months of evidence this way.
Date everything. Chronology is what makes development visible.
Keep it continuous. Fifteen minutes at the end of each session beats a weekend of reconstruction, and the reconstruction is always worse because the reasoning is gone.
Show scale. Photograph work with something for scale, or state dimensions. Assessors cannot judge a piece whose size they cannot infer.
What actually loses marks in this task
- Assembling the portfolio retrospectively.
- An inquiry that is a topic rather than a question.
- Only successful experiments.
- Influences named as movements, or artists named without specific works.
- Captions that describe materials but not intention.
- Reflection with no consequent decision.
- Undated, unphotographed process, so development cannot be seen.
- No visible connection between the portfolio's inquiry and the resolved artworks.
Educerie · written from the published IB Diploma Programme structure for Visual Arts, Task 1, first assessment 2027. Original text. Last reviewed 5 September 2026.