2. painting terms
• Pigment – powdered color
• Vehicle – a liquid that holds pigment together
• Binder – helps the paint to stick to the surface
• Support – the painting surface
• Primer – a preliminary coating to prepare the
surface for painting
• Gesso – mixture of white pigment and glue used
to seal a surface to prepare for painting
• Medium – has multiple meanings in art
– 1. the material used to make art (oil, charcoal, clay, glass)
– 2. standard category of art (sculpture, painting, ceramics)
– 3. a liquid used to make paint, also used to thin paint
(linseed oil)
3. Painting media
• Encaustic
• Fresco
• Tempera
• Oil
• Watercolor
• Gouache
• Acrylic
• Mixed media
4. Encaustic
• Sometimes called hot wax painting
• Pigment is mixed with wax and resin, usually applied to
wood panels
• The paint is heated to melt it and make it easy to brush
• Once the painting is complete, the artist brings the
heat source close to the surface to fuse the colors
(burning in)
• A very long-lasting painting method, colors do not fade
over time
• Used in ancient Greece and in Roman-Egyptian
portraiture
• Jasper Johns used encaustic to build up a rich texture
5. Fayum mummy
portrait,
Young Woman with a
Gold Pectoral,
Roman Egypt,
2nd century
9. Fresco
• Pigment is mixed with water and applied to plaster, usually a wall
• True fresco is applied to wet lime plaster
– as it dries the lime has a chemical reaction and acts a
binder, fusing the pigment and plaster
• Dry fresco is applied to dry plaster
• Used for large scale murals since ancient times
• Requires very careful planning and hard physical labor
• Time-consuming; Michelangelo covered 1 sq yard a day
– The pigment can only be applied at the exact proper dampness
• Artists used a cartoon with perforations as a guideline
• Every brushstroke in a fresco painting is a commitment, it cant be
painted over or reworked in any way, to redo it the dry plaster
must be chipped out of the wall and replastered
10. Fresco of a Roman woman from
Pompeii, c. 50 CE
14. Tempera
• Sometimes called egg tempera
• The vehicle for it is an emulsion; can be
oil, fat, wax, resin, casein, but most famously egg
yolk
• Has qualities similar to both oil and watercolor
• Retains the brilliance of its colors for centuries
• Dries quickly, hard to blend once brushed on
• Artists often apply it in a cross-hatching style
• Traditionally used on wood prepped with gesso
20. oil
• Pigment compounded with oil, usually linseed oil
• Jan Van Eyck was one of the first artists to understand the
possibilities of oil,
– since he began using it, oil became THE most popular type of painting
• Allowed artists to switch from painting on wood panels to canvas
• Paint can be used in various thicknesses
– Glazes - thin, translucent veils of color
– Impasto – very thick paint, often strait from the tube
• Dries VERY slowly
– Advantages:
• colors can be blended and the surface can be reworked for a VERY long time
• allowed for no cracking problems when layering paint
– Disadvantage:
• it can take weeks or months for a painting to fully set
21. Portrait of a Man in a Turban, Jan Van
Eyck, 1433, tempera and oil on panel
30. Lady at her Toilette, Berthe
Morisot, 1875, oil on canvas
31. Girl Arranging Her Hair,
Berthe Morisot,
1885-86, oil on canvas
broken color - a
technique where the
painting is made up of
individual strokes rather
than a smooth blended
field of color
34. Grisaille – painting technique where a
monochromatic underpainting utilizing the desired
value changes is produced before adding colored
glazes in layers to float over it
This is a
computerized
grisaille
version of the
Ingres
masterpiece
35. Linda Nochlin – art historian (p. 173)
• Throughout this semester I have shown you many artworks by women artists.
• There are many women artists used as examples throughout your textbook.
• This is possible because of the work of Linda Nochlin. She wrote various
papers in the early 1970s pointing out the absence of women artists in art
history books all over the world.
– “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” 1971, ArtNews
• Prior to her research and writing, it was presumed in the art world not only
that most artists were men, but that men were better artists.
• Her work is thought to be the impetus for the Feminist Art movement in the
1970s.
• Her work explains the many reasons why women artists were nearly absent
until the 20th century.
36. Watercolor
• Pigment using gum arabic as a binder
• The most common support is paper
• Considered to be the most intimate of
painting media
• They are transparent, the white of the paper is
meant to show through the color
• The white of the paper is reserved as the
white in the painting
37. Mountain Stream, John Singer Sargent,
watercolor and graphite on paper, 1912-14,
tradition watercolor style
45. Acrylic
• Paint made from synthetic plastic resin
• The vehicle is an acrylic resin, polymerized by emulsion in
water
• A more proper name would be polymer paints
• Inexpensive
• Readily available in many many colors
• Dry quickly and form a tough but flexible waterproof
surface
• Acrylics can mimic oil, watercolor, gouache and tempera
• They can be used on most any surface
• The can be applied very thick (impasto style) or they can
be thinned with water and applied in a translucent wash
46. Mount Fuji,
David Hockney,
1972, acrylic on
canvas
the artist uses washes for
the background and a
thick impasto for the
foreground
47. The Castle of Tin Tin, 1998, Takashi Murakami,
airbrushed acrylic on canvas on board
it has been influenced by anime, the artist says traditional Japanese work has
a flatness as compared to Western work which uses modeling and depth
48. Collage
• An innovation of Picasso and Braque, after
Cubism; they called it “synthetic cubism”
• Collage is a french word meaning “pasting” or
“gluing”
• The artists attaches actual objects such as
paper or cloth to the canvas or other support
• A form of assemblage art
• Inspired off-shoots such as decoupage
(multiples) and photomontage (photo images)
49. Still Life with Chair-
Caning, Picasso, 1912, oil and oilcloth on
canvas with rope frame
59. Watercolor techniques
• 5 techniques required for the in-class project:
1. A graded wash
2. Wet on wet
3. Wet on dry (also called a controlled wash)
4. Dry brush
5. Lifting (use a paper towel or a clean dry brush to lift paint off of the paper)
• It is possible to get all 5 of these techniques into a single
painting. A landscape or a still life (such as a flower) will work
nicely for these.
• Bonus point opportunity:
– Everyone can do one or two extra watercolor paintings
worth 10 bonus points each
