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What is Water Colour?

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Water colour is colour pigment ground in gum, usually gum arabic, and applied with brush and water to a painting surface, usually paper; the term also refers to an artwork executed in this medium. The pigment is ordinarily transparent but can be made opaque by blending with a whiting and in this form is known as body colour, or gouache. It can also be mixed with casein, a phosphoprotein of milk.

Watercolour compares in range and variety with any other painting method. Transparent watercolour allows for a vibrance and luminosity in its washes and for a deft calligraphic brushwork that makes it a most attractive medium. If there is one basic difference between transparent watercolour and all other heavy painting mediums, its transparency. The oil painter can apply one opaque colour over another until he has achieved his preferred result. The whites are created with opaque white. The watercolourist’s approach is the complete. In essence, instead of building up he leaves out. The paper itself creates the whites. The darker accents are applied on the paper with the pigment as it comes out of the tube or with very little water mixed with it. Otherwise the colours are diluted with water. The greater amount of water in the wash, the more the paper affects the colours; for example, vermilion, a warm red, will eventually turn into a cool pink as it is diluted with more water.

The dry-brush technique, the use of the brush containing pigment but little water, dragged over the coarse surface of the paper—creates various granular effects similar to those of crayon drawing. Whole compositions can be made in this way. This technique may also be brushed over darker washes to enliven them.

Three hundred years before the Renaissance of late 18th-century English watercolourists, Albrecht Dürer had anticipated their method of transparent colour washes in a remarkable series of plant studies and panoramic landscapes. Until the emergence of the English school, however, watercolour became a medium merely for colour tinting outlined drawings or, combined with opaque body colour to produce effects similar to gouache (see below Gouache) or tempera, was used in preparatory studies for oil paintings.

The chief exponents of the English method were Thomas Girtin, John Sell Cotman, John Robert Cozens, Richard Parkes Bonington, David Cox, and Constable. Their contemporary J.M.W. Turner, however, true to his unorthodox genius, added white to his watercolour and utilized rags, sponges, and knives to create stunning impressions of light and texture. Victorian watercolourists, such as Birket Foster, used a time consuming technique of colour washing a monochrome underpainting, similar in principle to the tempera-oil technique. Following the direct, vigorous watercolours of the French Impressionists and Postimpressionists, however, the medium was established in Europe and America as an expressive picture medium in its own right. Notable 20th-century watercolourists have been Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Dufy, and Georges Rouault; the U.S. artists Thomas Eakins, Maurice Prendergast, Charles Burchfield, John Marin, Lyonel Feininger, and Jim Dine; and the English painters John and Paul Nash, Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden, Edward Burra, and Patrick Procktor.

In the “pure” watercolour technique, often referred to as the English method, no white or other opaque pigment is applied, colour intensity and tonal depth being built up by successive, transparent washes on wet paper. Patches of white paper are left unpainted to represent white objects and to create effects of reflected light. These flecks of untouched paper produce the sparkle characteristic of pure watercolour. Tonal gradations and soft, atmospheric qualities are rendered by staining the paper when it is very wet with differing proportions of pigment. Sharp accents, lines, and coarse textures are introduced when the paper has dried. The paper should be of the type sold as “handmade from rags”; this is generally thick and grained. Cockling is avoided when the surface dries out if the dampened paper has been first stretched across a special frame or held in position during painting by an edging of adhesive tape.

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Oil Paints and Painting

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Artists’ oil colours are put together by adding dry powder pigments with special refined linseed oil until the mixture reaches a stiff paste texture then grinding it by powerful friction in steel roller mills. The consistency of the hue is essential. The usual feel is a smooth, buttery paste, rather than stringy or long or tacky. When a more flowing or mobile style is required by the artist, a liquid painting medium such as pure gum turpentine needs to be mixed with the substance. In order to expediate drying, a siccative, or liquid drier, might be generally used.

First-grade brushes are available in two kinds: red sable (from different members of the weasel family) and whitened hog bristles. Both are produced in in numbered sizes for the four regular shapes: round (pointed), flat, bright (flat shape but shorter and less supple), and oval (flat shape but bluntly pointed). Red sable brushes are widely utilised for smoother, more delicate kind of technique. The painting knife, a thinly tempered, skinny version of a art palette knife, is a useful utensil for using oil colours in a robust way.

The usual support for oil painting is a canvas created from pure European linen of stable close weave. The canvas is cut to the desired size and cast over a frame, generally a wooden frame, to which it is then secured with tacks or, during the 20th century, by staples. If the artist desires to lower the absorbency of the fabric and to achieve a glossy surface, a primer or ground is applied and left to dry prior to painting. The most usually employed primers for this have been gesso, rabbit-skin glue, and lead white. If rigidity and smoothness are preferred over springiness and texture, a wooden or processed paperboard panel, sized or primed, would be used. Lots of other supports, for example paper and different textiles and metals, have also been tried out.

A coat of picture varnish is generally put on to a finished oil painting to prevent any atmospheric attacks, minor abrasions, and an injurious accumulation of dirt. This film of picture varnish might be removed without damaging the painting by experts with isopropyl alcohol and other such household solvents. The varnish also takes the surface to a uniform lustre and sets the tonal depth and colour intensity really to the vibrancy initially created by the artist in the wet paint. Some painters, particularly those who don’t favour deep, intense colouring, will stay with a mat, or lustreless, finish in the paintings.

Many oil paintings from before the 19th century were built up in layers. The first layer was a blank, uniform field of thinned paint known as a ground. The ground graduated the gleaming white of the primer and provided a gentle colour on which to start painting. The shapes and figures in the painting were then roughly blocked in using shades of white, and gray or neutral green, red, or brown. The resulting field of monochromatic light and dark were called the underpainting. Forms were then further defined by using either solid paint or scumbles; irregular, thinly applied layers of opaque pigment that can display a range of pictorial effects. In the final point, transparent layers of pure colour called glazes would then be applied to create luminosity, depth, and brilliance to the forms, and highlights would be imparted with thick, textured patches of paint called impastos.

Oil as a medium of painting is dated circa the 11th century. The technique of easel painting with oil colours, however, resulted directly from 15th-century tempera-painting techniques. Basic improvements in the process of refining linseed oil and the availability of volatile solvents post 1400 coincided with a desire for a medium other than pure egg-yolk tempera, to meet the developing desires of the Renaissance (see tempera painting). At first, oil paints and varnishes would be used to glaze tempera panels that had been painted in their traditional linear draftsmanship. The technically gleaming, jewel-like portraits from the 15th-century Flemish painter Jan van Eyck, for example, were finished with the new style.

During the 16th century, oil paint emerged as the basic painting material in Venice. From then on, Venetian artists were proficient in exploiting the essential aspects of oil painting, especially in their employment of many layers of glazing. Canvas of linen, after a long time of development, topped wooden panels as the most popular support.

One 17th-century master of the oil technique was Velázquez, a Spanish painter in the Venetian tradition, whose supremely economical but certain brushstrokes have often been adopted, particularly in portraiture. The Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens challenged the norm in the manner in which he loaded his light colours opaquely, to juxtapose the thin, transparent darks and shadows. The third great 17th-century master of oil painting was the Dutch painter Rembrandt. In his artworks, a single brushstroke would effectively depict form; cumulative strokes gave great textural depth, with a combination of the rough and the smooth, the thick and the thin. A field of loaded whites and transparent darks is further enhanced by glazed effects, blendings, and highly controlled impastos.

Other notable influences on the techniques of later easel painting are the smooth, thinly painted, deliberately planned, tight qualities. A great many admired works (e.g., such as those of Johannes Vermeer) were executed with smooth gradations and blends of tones to cast subtly shadowed forms and delicate colour variations.

The technical requirements of some schools of modern painting cannot be realized with traditional genres or techniques, however, and many abstract painters – and to some extent modern traditionally-geared painters – have expressed a need for a plastic flow or viscosity that cannot be had in oil paint and its conventional additives. Some require a larger range of thick and/or thin applications and a more rapid rate of drying. Some artists have mixed coarsely grained materials with their colours to create textures, some are using oil paints in greater volume than traditionally, and lots have begun using acrylic paints, which are more versatile and dry fast.

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What is Sculpture?

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Sculpture is an art form in which hard or plastic materials are shaped into 3-D objects. The designs may be embodied in freestanding objects, in reliefs on surfaces, or in environments that can range from tableaux to contexts enveloping the spectator. A huge variety of media are used, including clay, wax, stone, metal, fabric, glass, wood, plaster, rubber, and random “found” objects. Materials can be carved, modeled, molded, cast, wrought, welded, sewn, assembled, or otherwise shaped and combined.

Sculpture is not a fixed brand that applies to a permanently restricted category of objects or range of activities. It is, rather, the name given to art that is growing and is changing and is continually extending the range of activities and evolving new designs of objects. The scope of the term became much wider in the second part of the 20th century than as it had been merely two or three decades before, and in the fluid state of visual art at the start of the 21st century, no one can predict what its future possibilities are likely to see.

There are certain features which in previous centuries were thought to be essential to the sculpturing art but are now not present in a large part of modern sculpture and so no longer form part of a definition. One of the most significant of these is representation. Prior to the 20th century, sculpture was seen as a representational art; one that imitated forms in life, that were most often of human figures but also inanimate objects, including game, utensils, and books. At the turn of the 20th century, however, sculpture has also included nonrepresentational forms. It has long been accepted that the forms of such functional three-dimensional objects as furniture, pots, and buildings might be expressive and beautiful without being in any way representational. It was only in the 20th century that nonfunctional, nonrepresentational, 3-D artworks began to be produced.

Previous to the 20th century, sculpture was regarded as essentially an art of solid form, or mass. Whilte the negative elements of sculpture — the voids and hollows within and between its solid areas — have generally been to some kind of degree an inextricable part of the design, but the role was unacknowledged. In a large part of modern sculpture, however, the focus of attention has widened, and the spatial aspects have started to come out as dominant. Spatial sculpture is currently a generally recognisable area of the art.

It was also taken for granted in sculpture from the past that its components were of a constant shape and size and, excepting pieces such as Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Diana (a monumental weather vane), did not move. With the contemporary development of kinetic sculpture, neither the immobility nor immutability of its elements can still be seen as inherent to sculpture.

Additionally, sculpture during the 20th century was no longer confined to the two traditional forming procedures of carving and modeling, or to any traditional natural materials like stone, metal, wood, ivory, bone, and clay. Because today’s sculptors might use any materials and methods of manufacture that they want, the art can no longer be identified for the use of any particular materials or techniques.

During all these changes, there is probably just one area that remains constant in the art of sculpture, and it emerges as the key abiding concern of sculptors: the art of sculpture is a part of the visual arts that is particularly concerned with the creation of objects in 3D.

Sculpture can be either in the round or in relief. A sculpture in the round is a separate, detached piece in its own right, leading the same kind of independent existence in reality as a human body or a chair. A sculpture that is in relief does not have this independance. It is attached to and projects from or is an integral part of some object that might serve either as a background for it or a matrix from which it projects.

The actual three-dimensionality of sculpture in the round puts limitations on its scope in some respects compared with the scope of painting. Sculpture will not conjure the illusion of space from purely optical means, or invest its shape with atmosphere and light as a painting can. Sculpture does have a realistic experience, a vivid physical presence that cannot be found in the pictorial arts. Sculpture can be tangible as well as visible, and appeal strongly and directly to both tactile and visual senses. Even the visually impaired, including those who are congenitally blind, can create and appreciate certain forms of sculpture. It was, in fact, said by the 20th-century art critic Sir Herbert Read that sculpture should be seen as primarily an art of touch and that the roots of sculptural sensibility can be based on the pleasure one feels in touch.

All 3D forms are viewed as possessing an expressive character along with their pure geometric properties. They may be viewed the observer as delicate, aggressive, flowing, taut, relaxed, dynamic, soft, and such. By exploiting the emotive qualities of form, the artist is able to create visual images in which subject matter and expressiveness of form are mutually reinforcing. Visual imagery will go beyond the pure presentation of fact and evoke a wide range of subtle and powerful feelings.

The aesthetic raw material used here is, so to speak, the total realm of expressive 3D form. A sculpture may draw upon what we know exists in the endless range of natural and man-made form, or it might be an art of genuine invention. It has been used to express a deep range of human emotions and feelings from the subtly tender and delicate to the highly violent and ecstatic.

All human beings, innately involved from birth with the world of 3-D form, learn something of its structural and expressive properties and will have emotional responses to them. This combination of intellectual understanding and reaction, also known as a sense of form, is able to be cultivated and refined. It is to this sense of form that this form of art primarily appeals.

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