How do I use visual thinking and investigation to develop ideas across my folio?
Use visual thinking and investigation to generate, test, and refine ideas and concepts as your folio develops.
How to use visual thinking and ongoing investigation to generate, test and refine ideas in the Folio, so your development reads as genuine inquiry rather than a tidy sequence of finished pieces.
Reviewed by: AI editorial process; not yet individually human-reviewed
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What this dot point is asking
The Folio is assessed as part of the 70 percent school component, and what it really rewards is evidence of thinking. The SACE subject describes students using visual thinking and investigation to develop ideas and concepts, refine technical skills, and produce imaginative solutions. This dot point is about making that thinking visible on the page.
What visual thinking actually is
Visual thinking is reasoning through images and materials. Instead of deciding everything in your head and then producing a neat result, you think by drawing, photographing, arranging, and trialling. A quick thumbnail that tests three compositions is visual thinking. A page of colour swatches comparing two palettes is visual thinking. The making is how you work the problem out.
A folio full of finished-looking pages can actually score lower than a messier one, because the polished version hides the thinking. Assessors want to see the choices being made.
Investigation as a deliberate process
Investigation is the structured side of visual thinking. It means setting yourself a question or problem and then exploring it on purpose. Rather than drifting, you ask something specific, such as how to make a surface feel decayed, and then run a set of trials that genuinely answer it.
Good investigation has direction. Each experiment responds to what the last one showed. If a trial fails, you say why and what you will change. That cause-and-effect chain is exactly what turns a pile of experiments into an inquiry.
Annotating your thinking
Visual thinking still needs words to be legible to an assessor. Brief, honest annotations make the process readable: what you were trying, what happened, and what you decided next. Annotation is not decoration and should never just relabel the image. It should record the decision.
Keep annotations specific. Saying a trial worked well is empty; saying the off-register layering suggested memory loss, so you kept it, records a real decision. The best folios read like a logbook of choices.
Connecting to the rest of the course
Visual thinking and investigation are not a separate task. They are the engine behind your Practical and your Visual Study. The directions you test in the Folio become the resolved body of work, and the same investigative habit drives the externally assessed Visual Study. Strong investigation early makes resolution later far easier, because you have already learned what works.
Keeping the inquiry moving
The single most common way investigation stalls is that each experiment is treated as a standalone sample rather than a response to the one before it. To keep the inquiry alive, end every trial with a decision about the next one: this layering read as too even, so next I will vary the pressure to break it up. That habit turns a pile of swatches into a chain of reasoning, where the assessor can see one finding driving the next move. It also protects you against the deadline trap of producing many disconnected pages late in the year, because an inquiry that has been responding to its own findings all along already has a visible spine and a clear direction into the resolved work.
Treat the Folio as a record of how you think, not a gallery of what you made. Generate options, test them against your concept, refine the strongest, and annotate the decisions as you go. That visible, evidenced inquiry is what visual thinking and investigation means in SACE Stage 2 Visual Arts.
Exam-style practice questions
Practice questions written in the style of SACE Board exam questions on this dot point, with worked answer explainers. The year tag is the paper they imitate, not the source.
SACE 202212 marksAnalyse how visual thinking and investigation drove the development of ideas in your folio. Refer to specific trials and explain how your investigation responded to its own findings.Show worked answer →
Define visual thinking as reasoning through images and materials (thumbnails, swatches, trials) and investigation as deliberately testing, comparing and refining over time. Stress that a polished folio can score lower than a messier one because the polish hides the thinking.
Anchor to the urban-erosion example: photographs of cracked walls (generation), four ways to recreate the texture, drybrush acrylic, sgraffito into plaster, frottage rubbings, a digital overlay (testing), with annotations on which reads as most convincingly weathered and why the digital version looked fake, then combining sgraffito with rubbings on a larger surface (refinement). Each experiment responds to what the last one showed.
Top answers make the thinking legible through specific annotations that record decisions, not relabel images, and show a clear line from question to resolved technique. Reverse-engineering the folio so it looks like a smooth path with no dead ends caps the marks.
SACE 20216 marksExplain how annotation makes visual thinking legible to an assessor, and what distinguishes strong annotation from weak annotation.Show worked answer →
Argue that visual thinking still needs words to be readable: brief, honest annotations record what you were trying, what happened, and what you decided next. Annotation is not decoration and should never just relabel the image.
Contrast weak and strong: saying a trial "worked well" is empty, while "the off-register layering suggested memory loss, so I kept it" records a real decision. Marks reward annotation that captures the decision and the reasoning. Annotation that merely describes what is visible scores lower.