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A Coup de pinceau project. In french only.
Brushes are the basic tools of the trade. They help you to convey your artistic vision stroke by stroke. But not all brushes are made alike; different brushes are suited to different paints and painting techniques. You will want to select your brushes based on the sort of paint you’ll be working with, and then choose bristle tips that suit the effects you want to create.
While watercolour is a relatively modern type of paint, its ancestry dates back throughout recorded history, and examples of watercolour work can be found in ancient Egyptian and early Oriental art. The medium is renowned for helping artists create liquid, luminous and transparent images, with a veil-like quality that’s quite different from the denser textures of acrylics and oils.
Paints are made of powder pigments and binders to keep the pigments together and help them adhere to a surface. The binder determines the paint’s viscosity, while pigment gives it its colour and opacity. There are two categories of pigments: organic (modern) and inorganic. When you’re blending paints, remember that pigments of the same category mix better because they share common properties.
Additives are intended to change the behaviour of acrylic colours. They’re not made of polymer resins and can’t be used alone or as adhesives. They need to be used even more carefully than mediums; be sure to follow the recommended ratio for each product.
Oil painting often requires the use of solvents both to dilute the paint and to clean brushes and other tools. While the most popular solvent is turpentine, some others have smells that are easier to handle.
Once dry, acrylic paint forms a strong enough surface that there’s no need to varnish it for protection. It can still be a good precaution to take, if the painting will be hung in a harsh environment that includes smoke and dust. Be sure that your canvas is dry before varnishing it. It’s wise to wait three to five days for an average painting and a week or two if it has thicker coats (impastos.)
Oil paint is a traditional medium with a long history in the art world. Professionals and amateurs love it for its wide range of colours, from rich and velvety dark shades to brilliant brights and every subtle variation in between. It also can be used to create a wide variety of effects, from translucent films (glazes) to thick and creamy impastos and lends itself well to most techniques, from bold strokes to the finest detail work.
Artists’ paint manufacturers have developed wide ranges of products for the needs of a diverse clientele. They generally provide two categories of paints: extra-fine paints, which are more expensive and of better quality, and fine paints, which are less expensive.
Mediums for oil serve to modify the consistency of your paint (i.e., to make it thicker or more fluid,) as well as its finish and drying time. There are hundreds of recipes for oil paint mediums, from extremely simple to very complex. The basic ingredients are solvent and oil; then you add a drier, a hard resin, wax, mastic, and so on as needed.
Varnishes are composed of three ingredients: resin, plasticizer and solvent.
Paste mediums give body to the paint and allow you to do thick work to create texture and impasto. The main ingredients that give these mediums their thick consistency are waxes, mastics and gels.
There are mediums out there for just about every need. They’re all made of polymer resins exactly like acrylic paint, but they don’t contain pigments. As a result, you can add as much medium as you like to your colour. But remember: The more medium you add, the more you disperse the pigments.
Many artists work with very little supplies to create beautiful watercolours, but mediums can enhance your work by helping you alter drying time, control paint flow, add texture, or smooth your blending. Traditional mediums such as masking fluid,ox gall and gum arabic remain the most popular watercolour mediums, but recently additional mediums have made an appearance on the market as well. Here’s an introduction to what you may find.
Artists began using acrylic paints only in the mid-twentieth century, thanks to advances in chemistry. Today, many people enjoy acrylics because they’re more permanent than any other medium, and very easy to use.
Gouache is a close cousin of watercolour. It’s made of virtually the same ingredients, except that it’s opaque and matte with added barium sulphate or lime precipitate, and contains glycerine to make it more soluble.
The labels on tubes and jars of paint feature all sorts of useful information. But it often appears in short form to fit in the small space on the container. So what does it all really mean? Here’s a list of the most common details you may find. Each element will not necessarily appear on every product label, and the information provided may vary depending on the manufacturer.
