Painting is an art of creating an imaginary or realistic world through creative skills and extraordinary thoughts, and uniqueness by using a different medium of art. It would be visual, performing, and contemporary art to give a message about life and also creating memories for a long time. Since the inception of life, painting art is the most potent way of creating visual stories; that how life came into being, struggling and inspiration through the universe; Homo sapiens started painting with sharp stone’s tip in the caves.
Cave art is the oldest form of visual painting in the early Paleolithic era because they relate the nature with different shapes and values according to their characters and then convert into a modern format such as the Mesolithic and Neolithic era.
Art is a global activity that included a large number of disciplines. It is a varying range of cultural and traditional aspects of human activities that lead to visual, auditory of social work, expressing the author’s imaginative, ideas, and skills. The oldest form of art is visual arts that rebirth the images or objects through imaginations and real life. It can be categorized as painting, sculpture, and architecture.
The art painting is defined as drawing or create thoughts using paints, pigments, colors, and other mediums to a solid surface like colors, paper, canvas, wood, glass, lacquer, and many more. The painting is created by using pigments frequently that are applied with the help of brushes.
Basic Ingredients of Painting:
All paints are made by using the following three basic ingredients:
- Pigments are natural extracts of plants and minerals and can also be synthesized chemically in laboratories. Natural dyes were the earliest color form used in painting work.
- Blinders are a material that binds the components of pigments chemically due to its attractive forces, by adhesion and cohesion.
- Solvents are used for dilution purposes. It would be water or oil that is mix with paints like water in acrylics and watercolors, and linseed oil is used in oil paints to keep them fresh and smooth during painting work with the help of a brush and convert thick viscous paste into dilute one.
The Medium of Art Painting:
Painting media has much diversity, but the primary six are Encaustic, Tempera, Fresco, Oil, Acrylic, Watercolors, which can be applied on different surfaces. Details of these are;
- Encaustic: also called hot wax painting, derived from a Greek word that means “burning in.” This painting involves mixed media techniques, and pigments are added in hot beeswax. This liquid is then applied on a surface, but mostly canvas and other materials are used. Artists use encaustics to add texture, especially to abstract art.
- Tempera: At the end of the middle ages, the medium that you found in painting is Tempera or egg tempera. It is made by beaten egg white to make a smooth and transparent liquid, and later the basic pigments (which are available at that time) are added to that liquid. Due to its quick-drying and luminous properties account for the attraction of Tempera.
- Fresco: it is done on plaster walls and ceiling particularly. It has two forms, Buon meaning “wet” and secco, meaning “dry.”
- Watercolor is fragile and soft painting medium. And give an artistic look with a concise effort. Transparent and opaque watercolors use in painting media. And easily spread on paper, in the form of colorful clouds.
- Acrylic paint developed in 1950,s, and the alternative form of oil paints, an emulsion, is applied on the surface of the wall or canvas to apply acrylics over it. And acrylic colors become dry with-in a few minutes dry and look like rubber, and plastic kind of material and water is used to keep the stain damp and fresh. Acrylic paints are less expensive than oil paints and stay fresh all the time.
- Oil paint is the most common and ancient form of painting from an early period. Linseed oil is used and mixed with pigments of different hues to give them a shiny and smooth texture. Oil painting is developed in the most initial time, and it takes time to dry on the applied surface so you can easily change the colors after it.
Buon fresco painting is a technique by mixing pigment with water on a thin layer of plaster and fresh mortar to penetrate the stains into the plaster surface. And look like a two-dimensional relief art with a textured surface. Wet plaster absorbed the pigment within a few hours, as the plaster dried and fixed the pigment particles in the plaster. And become the part of the surface, and no binder is required because the plaster is already wet. It is not changeable after completion of artwork.
In the Secco fresco painting, the plaster on the wall image is dry. The pigment cannot penetrate directly, so you need a binder for this purpose because the dye is not mixed into the wet plaster. The standard binder that is used in this technique is “Egg tempera.” It is also used in Buon fresco painting to make a smooth surface and repair damage. Many well-known artists of the universe used these techniques.
Old Painting Mediums Change into Contemporary Mediums:
Spray paints are the modern tools now a day to use in the present era with different techniques. Spray paints are in a pressurized sealed container and come with pressure through the finger, and artists play well with shapes to create realistic images like natural scenes and live art.
Digital painting is the method of creating an art object digitally. It is also defined as a technique for making a digital painting on the computer and printing it on anything. This modern technique refers to a computer graphics software program that has different and latest tools for pasting pigments, which give a digital artwork with a different look and smooth feel. Furthermore, in digital painting, an artist uses his own paintings techniques to create a particular piece of art as a computer cannot automatically work for creating images. For this purpose, Adobe Photoshop is used by professionals. Digital printing is cheaper and time-saving medium than manual painting. It has become so popular nowadays. Many people are moving toward this unique technique to save time.
World Top and Expensive Paintings:
In western history, the most famous paintings are;
“Mona Lisa” and “The last supper” by Leonardo da Vinci’s, an Italian artist, made top-rated female face painting based on the golden ratio.
“The Starry Night” by Vincent van Gogh’s.