Oil painting is a painting method involving the procedure of painting with pigments with a medium of drying oil as the binder. It has been the most common technique for artistic painting on canvas, wood panel or copper for several centuries, spreading from Europe to the rest of the world. The advantages of oil for painting images include "greater flexibility, richer and denser colour, the use of layers, and a wider range from light to dark". But the process is slower, especially when one layer of paint needs to be allowed to dry before another is applied.
Paint is a material or mixture that, when applied to a solid material and allowed to dry, adds a film-like layer. As art, this is used to create an image or images known as a painting. Paint can be made in many colors and types. Most paints are either oil-based or water-based, and each has distinct characteristics.
A pastel is an art medium that consist of powdered pigment and a binder. It can exist in a variety of forms, including a stick, a square, a pebble, or a pan of color, though other forms are possible. The pigments used in pastels are similar to those used to produce some other colored visual arts media, such as oil paints; the binder is of a neutral hue and low saturation. The color effect of pastels is closer to the natural dry pigments than that of any other process.
Ultramarine is a deep blue color pigment which was originally made by grinding lapis lazuli into a powder. Its lengthy grinding and washing process makes the natural pigment quite valuable—roughly ten times more expensive than the stone it comes from and as expensive as gold.
A pigment is a powder used to add color or change visual appearance. Pigments are completely or nearly insoluble and chemically unreactive in water or another medium; in contrast, dyes are colored substances which are soluble or go into solution at some stage in their use. Dyes are often organic compounds whereas pigments are often inorganic. Pigments of prehistoric and historic value include ochre, charcoal, and lapis lazuli.
Ochre, iron ochre, or ocher in American English, is a natural clay earth pigment, a mixture of ferric oxide and varying amounts of clay and sand. It ranges in colour from yellow to deep orange or brown. It is also the name of the colours produced by this pigment, especially a light brownish-yellow. A variant of ochre containing a large amount of hematite, or dehydrated iron oxide, has a reddish tint known as red ochre.
Vermilion is a color family and pigment most often used between antiquity and the 19th century from the powdered mineral cinnabar. It is synonymous with red orange, which often takes a modern form, but is 11% brighter.
Azurite is a soft, deep-blue copper mineral produced by weathering of copper ore deposits. During the early 19th century, it was also known as chessylite, after the type locality at Chessy-les-Mines near Lyon, France. The mineral, a basic carbonate with the chemical formula Cu3(CO3)2(OH)2, has been known since ancient times, and was mentioned in Pliny the Elder's Natural History under the Greek name kuanos (κυανός: "deep blue," root of English cyan) and the Latin name caeruleum. Copper (Cu2+) gives it its blue color.
Whitewash, calcimine, kalsomine, calsomine, or lime paint is a type of paint made from slaked lime (calcium hydroxide, Ca(OH)2) or chalk (calcium carbonate, CaCO3), sometimes known as "whiting". Various other additives are sometimes used.
Oil paint is a type of slow-drying paint that consists of particles of pigment suspended in a drying oil, commonly linseed oil. For several centuries the oil painting has been perhaps the most prestigious form in Western art, but oil paint has many practical uses, mainly because it is waterproof.
Cobalt glass—known as "smalt" when ground as a pigment—is a deep blue coloured glass prepared by including a cobalt compound, typically cobalt oxide or cobalt carbonate, in a glass melt. Cobalt is a very intense colouring agent and very little is required to show a noticeable amount of colour.
Distemper is a decorative paint and a historical medium for painting pictures, and contrasted with tempera. The binder may be glues of vegetable or animal origin. Soft distemper is not abrasion resistant and may include binders such as chalk, ground pigments, and animal glue. Hard distemper is stronger and wear-resistant and can include casein or linseed oil as binders.
Foundation is a liquid, cream, or powder makeup applied to the face and neck to create an even, uniform color to the complexion, cover flaws and, sometimes, to change the natural skin tone. Some foundations also function as a moisturizer, sunscreen, astringent or base layer for more complex cosmetics. Foundation applied to the body is generally referred to as "body painting" or "body makeup".
Venetian ceruse or Venetian white, also known as blanc de céruse de Venise and Spirits of Saturn, was a 16th-century cosmetic used as a skin whitener. It was in great demand and considered the best available at the time, supposedly containing the best quality white lead sourced from Venice, the global merchant capital at the time. It is similar to the regular ceruse, although it was marketed as better, more exclusive and more expensive than the regular ceruse variant. The regular ceruse white pigment is a basic lead carbonate of chemical formula 2 PbCO
3·Pb(OH)
2 while the mineral cerussite is a simple carbonate of lead.
Mummy brown, also known as Egyptian brown or Caput Mortuum, was a rich brown bituminous pigment with good transparency, sitting between burnt umber and raw umber in tint. The pigment was made from the flesh of mummies mixed with white pitch and myrrh. Mummy brown was extremely popular from the mid-eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries. However, fresh supplies of mummies diminished, and artists were less satisfied with the pigment's permanency and finish. By 1915, demand had significantly declined. Suppliers ceased to offer it by the middle of the twentieth century.
White lead is the basic lead carbonate 2PbCO3·Pb(OH)2. It is a complex salt, containing both carbonate and hydroxide ions. White lead occurs naturally as a mineral, in which context it is known as hydrocerussite, a hydrate of cerussite. It was formerly used as an ingredient for lead paint and a cosmetic called Venetian ceruse, because of its opacity and the satiny smooth mixture it made with dryable oils. However, it tended to cause lead poisoning, and its use has been banned in most countries.
Minium, also known as red lead or red lead oxide, is a bright orange red pigment that was widely used in the Middle Ages for the decoration of manuscripts and for painting. Often mistaken for less poisonous cinnabar and vermillion, minium was one of the earliest pigments artificially prepared and is still in use today. It was made by roasting white lead pigment in the air; the white lead would gradually turn yellow, then into an orange lead tetroxide. Minium's color varied depending upon how long the mineral was roasted.
Lead-tin yellow is a yellow pigment, of historical importance in oil painting, sometimes called the "Yellow of the Old Masters" because of the frequency with which it was used by those famous painters.
A colorant is any substance that changes the spectral transmittance or reflectance of a material. Synthetic colorants are those created in a laboratory or industrial setting. The production and improvement of colorants was a driver of the early synthetic chemical industry, in fact many of today's largest chemical producers started as dye-works in the late 19th or early 20th centuries, including Bayer AG(1863). Synthetics are extremely attractive for industrial and aesthetic purposes as they have they often achieve higher intensity and color fastness than comparable natural pigments and dyes used since ancient times. Market viable large scale production of dyes occurred nearly simultaneously in the early major producing countries Britain (1857), France (1858), Germany (1858), and Switzerland (1859), and expansion of associated chemical industries followed. The mid-nineteenth century through WWII saw an incredible expansion of the variety and scale of manufacture of synthetic colorants. Synthetic colorants quickly became ubiquitous in everyday life, from clothing to food. This stems from the invention of industrial research and development laboratories in the 1870s, and the new awareness of empirical chemical formulas as targets for synthesis by academic chemists. The dye industry became one of the first instances where directed scientific research lead to new products, and the first where this occurred regularly.
Green pigments are the materials used to create the green colors seen in painting and the other arts. Most come from minerals, particularly those containing compounds of copper. Green pigments reflect the green portions of the spectrum of visible light, and absorb the others. Important green pigments in art history include Malachite and Verdigris, found in tomb paintings in Ancient Egypt, and the Green earth pigments popular in the Middle Ages. More recent greens, such as Cobalt Green, are largely synthetic, made in laboratories and factories.
