Short answers, pulled from the story.
The visual arts are art forms perceived through the eye, including painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics, photography, video, filmmaking, design, crafts, and architecture. Current usage also includes fine art alongside applied and decorative arts such as industrial design, graphic design, fashion design, interior design, and decorative art.
For some centuries before the Arts and Crafts Movement, the term artist was often reserved for people working in the fine arts, meaning painting, sculpture, or printmaking, and withheld from those in decorative arts, crafts, or applied media. Art schools maintained that a craftsperson could not be considered a practitioner of the arts.
Figurative art of the Upper Paleolithic begins at least 40,000 years ago, with non-figurative cave work such as hand stencils even older. Tools for processing pigments date back roughly 200,000 years in regions like Zambia, and formal cave paintings date to at least 50,000 years old.
Artists mixed pigments into drying oils to achieve more realistic representation, using shading and glazing to build chiaroscuro and suggest three dimensions with light and shadow. The 19th-century box easel and collapsible paint tube let painters work outdoors in nature, a practice called plein air, and the tube also introduced synthetic colors.
Mokuhanga is Japanese woodblock printing best known for the ukiyo-e genre, widely adopted during the Edo period from 1603 to 1867. Unlike Western woodcut, it uses water-based inks, allowing a wide range of vivid color, glazes, and color transparency.
Under United States copyright law, a work of visual art is a painting, drawing, print, or sculpture in a single copy or a signed, consecutively numbered edition of 200 copies or fewer, or a still photographic image produced for exhibition only on the same terms. It excludes posters, maps, technical drawings, motion pictures, merchandising, advertising, and any work made for hire.