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What is Water Colour?

Water colour is a form of colour pigment ground in gum, usually gum arabic, and applied with brush and water to a painting surface, usually paper; the term also denotes a work of art executed in this medium. The pigment is normally transparent but can be turned 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 can compare in range and quality with any other painting method. Transparent watercolour allows for a freshness and luminosity in its washes and for a deft calligraphic brushwork that makes it a most attractive medium. There is one basic difference between transparent watercolour and all other heavy painting mediums, its transparency. The oil painter can paint one opaque colour over another until he has achieved his desired result. The whites are created with opaque white. The watercolourist’s approach is the opposite. In essence, instead of adding in he leaves out. The paper itself creates the whites. The darkest accents may be placed on the paper with the pigment as it is squeezed 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 changes the colours; for example, vermilion, a warm red, will gradually turn into a cool pink as it is thinned with more water.

The dry-brush technique, the application of the brush containing pigment but little water, dragged over the rough surface of the paper—creates various granular effects similar to those of a crayon sketch. Entire compositions can be produced in this way. This technique may also be used over darker washes to enliven them.

Three hundred years before the late 18th-century English watercolourists, Albrecht Dürer had anticipated their approach to transparent colour washes in a groundbreaking 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 preliminary studies for oil paintings.

The main pracitioners 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 used rags, sponges, and knives to create unique effects of light and texture. Victorian watercolourists, such as Birket Foster, used a time consuming technique of colour washing a monochrome underpainting, similar 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 visual 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 bare paper create 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 after 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

Artists’ oil colours are made by stirring dry powder pigments with selected refined linseed oil until the substance reaches a stiff paste consistency then grinding it by strong friction in steel roller mills. The consistency of the hue is essential. The common standard is a smooth, buttery paste, and not stringy or long or tacky. When a transient or mobile aspect is required by the artist, a liquid painting medium like pure gum turpentine needs to be combined with the concoction. If the artist wants to expediate drying, a siccative, or liquid drier, may be often used.

Top-grade brushes are manufactured in two kinds: red sable (from varying members of the weasel species) and bleached hog bristles. Both are produced in in numbered sizes for any of four regular shapes: round (pointed), flat, bright (flat shape but shorter and less supple), and oval (flat but bluntly pointed). Red sable brushes are widely chosen for the smoother, more detailed type of brushstroking. The painting knife, a declicately tempered, skinny version of a art palette knife, is a common utensil for using oil colours in a robust way.

The generic support for oil paintings is a canvas created from pure European linen of strong close weave. A canvas is cut to the necessary size and pulled over a frame, often a wood frame, and then secured with tacks or, since the 20th century, with staples. If the artist desires to reduce the absorbency of the fabric itself and create a consistent surface, a primer or ground may be applied and is allowed to dry before painting begins. The most generally found primers for this are gesso, rabbit-skin glue, and lead white. If rigidity and smoothness are preferred rather than elasticity and texture, a wooden or processed paperboard panel, sized or primed, could be employed. Lots of other supports, for example paper and differing textiles and metals, have been tried out.

A polish of varnish is usually given to a finished oil painting to prevent atmospheric attacks, minor abrasions, or harmful accumulation of dirt. This film of picture varnish can be removed without damaging the painting by experts using isopropyl alcohol and such household solvents. Varnishing also brings the surface to a uniform lustre and brings the tonal depth and colour intensity basically to the level originally seen by the artist in the wet paint. Some painters today, in particular those who don’t favour deep, intense colouring, and prefer a mat, or lustreless, finish in oil paintings.

The majority of oil paintings made prior to the 19th century were created in layers. The first layer was a blank, uniform field of thinned paint known as a ground. The ground subdued the white glare of the primer and established a base of gentle colour on which to apply the paint. The forms and objects in the painting would be roughly blocked in with shades of white, and gray or neutral green, red, or brown. The eventuating masses of monochromatic shades were called the underpainting. Forms were given definition with either the paint or scumbles, which are irregular, thinly applied layers of opaque pigment that creates a variety of pictorial effects. At the last step, transparent layers of pure colour known as a glaze then could be employed to display luminosity, depth, and brilliance to the figures, and highlights would then be effected with thick, textured patches of paint known as impastos.

Oil as a medium for painting is dated back to the 11th century. The practice of easel painting with oil colours, however, came directly from 15th-century tempera-painting techniques. Simple improvements in refining linseed oil and the availability of volatile solvents from 1400 coincided with a desire for some other medium than pure egg-yolk tempera, in meeting the contemporary desires of the Renaissance (see tempera painting). At first, oil paints and varnishes would be employed to glaze tempera panels that were painted with their usual linear draftsmanship. The technically brilliant, jewel-like paintings of the 15th-century Flemish artist Jan van Eyck, for example, were done in this new technique.

During the 16th century, oil colour became established as the fundamental painting material in Venice. By the end of the century, Venetian painters had grown proficient in the exploitation of the basic aspects of oil painting, especially in their use of a number of layers of glaze. Canvas, after a long time of growth, replaced wood panelling as the most commonly used support.

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

Other notable influences on later easel painting techniques are the smooth, thinly painted, deliberately planned, tight styles. A great many admired works (e.g., from Johannes Vermeer) were crafted with smooth gradations and blends of tones to cast shadowy forms and delicate colour variations.

The technical requirements of some schools of modern painting cannot be achieved by use of traditional genres and techniques, however. Many abstract painters - and a few modern traditional painters - have demonstrated a desire for a wholly different plastic flow or viscosity that cannot be created from oil paint and its conventional additives. Some want a wider range of thick or thin applications and a more expedient rate of drying. Some have mixed coarsely grained substances with the colours to create textures, some artists have used oil paints in heavier thicknesses than before, and a large part have turned to the use of acrylic paints, which are more versatile and dry very fast.

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What is Sculpture?

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

Sculpture is not a fixed name that is applicable to a permanently restricted category of objects or set of activities. It is, rather, an art that grows and changes and continually extends the range of activities and evolving new types of objects. The breadth of the term was much wider in the later half of the 20th century than what it had been just two or three decades previously, and in the evolving state of visual art at the beginning of the 21st century, one simply cannot predict what its future extensions are likely to become.

Some features which in previous centuries were considered essential to the art of sculpture but are now not present in a big part of modern sculpture and can no longer form part of a definition. One of the most important of these is representation. Before the 20th century, sculpture was considered to be a representational art; imitating forms in life, that were mostly of human figures but also inanimate objects, such as game, utensils, and books. From the turn of the 20th century, however, sculpture also began to include nonrepresentational forms. It has long been accepted that figures of such functional 3D objects as furniture, pots, and buildings could be expressive and beautiful without being representational. It was only during the 20th century that nonfunctional, nonrepresentational, 3-D works of art began to be common practice.

Prior to the 20th century, sculpture was seen as essentially an art of solid form, or mass. Whilte the negative elements of sculpture — the voids and hollows within and between its solid forms — have usually been to some degree an intricate part of the design, but this role was blatantly secondary. In a good part of modern sculpture, however, the focus has broadened, and the spatial roles have become dominant. Spatial sculpture is currently a wholly accepted field of the art of sculpture.

It was also taken for granted in the past ideas of sculpture that its components were of a constant shape and size and, with the exception of pieces such as Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Diana (a monumental weather vane), could not move. With the recent development of kinetic sculpture, neither the immobility nor immutability of its elements can still be regarded as essential to the definition of the art.

Last, sculpture in the 20th century was not limited to the two traditional forming methods of carving and modeling, or to such traditional natural materials including stone, metal, wood, ivory, bone, and clay. As today’s sculptors will use any materials and methods of manufacture that they can, the art form can no longer be identified with any particular kind of materials or techniques.

With all these changes, there is probably still one thing that has remained constant in sculpture, and it exists as the foremost 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 3-D.

Sculpture may 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 the world as a human body or a chair. A sculpture that is in relief does not have this kind of independence. It is part of and projects from or is an integral part of an object that can serve either as a background for it or a matrix from whence it emerges.

The actual 3D nature of sculpture in the round limits its scope in a few respects in comparison with the scope of painting. Sculpture will not have the illusion of space by simple optical means, or invest its structure with atmosphere and light as a painting might. It does possess a reality, a vivid physical presence that is denied in the pictorial arts. The forms of sculpture are tangible as well as visible, and may appeal strongly and directly to both tactile and visual senses. Even the visually impaired, including those who are congenitally blind, can produce and appreciate different types of sculpture. It was, in fact, said by the 20th-century art critic Sir Herbert Read that sculpture should be considered as firstly an art of touch and that the origins of sculptural sensibility can be traced to the pleasure one feels in doing this.

All 3-D forms are perceived as exhibiting an expressive character along with purely geometric properties. They may come across to the observer as delicate, aggressive, flowing, taut, relaxed, dynamic, soft, and such. By exploiting the emotive qualities of form, a sculptor is able to create images in which subject matter and expressiveness of form are mutually reinforcing. Visual imagery can go beyond the pure presentation of fact and evoke a near endless range of subtle and powerful emotions.

The aesthetic raw material for this art form is, so to speak, the whole realm of expressive three-dimensional form. A sculpture can draw upon what we see that exists in the endless range of natural and man-made form, or it may be an art of genuine invention. It has been used to express a deep range of human emotions and feelings from the most tender and delicate to the terribly violent and ecstatic.

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

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