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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 refers to an artwork executed in this medium. The pigment is normally transparent but can be turned opaque by mixing with a whiting and in this form is known as body colour, or gouache. It can also be blended 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 alluring medium. If 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 preferred result. The whites are created with an opaque white. The watercolourist’s approach is the opposite. In essence, instead of building up he leaves out. The paper itself creates the whites. The darker accents are 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 absorbs the colours; for example, vermilion, a warm red, will eventually 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 coarse surface of the paper—creates various granular effects similar to those of a crayon drawing. Entire compositions can be created in this way. This technique also may be brushed over darker washes to enliven them.

Three hundred years before the late 18th-century English watercolourists, Albrecht Dürer had anticipated their method of 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 preparatory sketches for oil paintings.

The chief 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 realize stunning impressions of light and texture. Victorian painters, such as Birket Foster, used a laborious method 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 eventually 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 colour is applied, colour intensity and tonal depth being built up by successive, transparent washes on damp paper. Patches of white paper are left unpainted to represent white objects and to create effects of reflected light. These flecks of bare 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 varying 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 mixing dry powder pigments with special refined linseed oil until it reaches a stiff paste thickness then grinding it by strong friction in steel roller mills. The perfection of the colour is important. The usual standard is a smooth, buttery paste, as opposed to stringy or long or tacky. When a transient or mobile element is desired by the artist, a liquid painting medium such as pure gum turpentine has to be mixed with the mixture. To speed up drying, a siccative, or liquid drier, could be generally used.

Top-grade brushes are manufactured in two styles: red sable (hair from numerous members of the weasel family) and whitened hog bristles. They both are produced in in numbered sizes for the four regular shapes: round (pointed), flat, bright (flat but shorter and not so supple), and oval (flat but is bluntly pointed). Red sable brushes are often used for a smoother, detailed kind of brushstroking. The painting knife, a declicately tempered, skinny version of an art palette knife, is a useful tool for using oil colours in a robust manner.

The generic support for oil paintings is a canvas manufactured of pure European linen of sturdy close weave. This canvas is cut to the desired size and cast over a frame, usually made of wood, and secured with tacks or, in the 20th century, by use of staples. If the artist wants to lessen the absorbency of the fabric and achieve a glossy surface, a primer or ground could be applied and given time to dry before painting begins. The most generally seen primers for this have been gesso, rabbit-skin glue, and lead white. If density and smoothness are preferred over elasticity and texture, a wooden or processed paperboard panel, sized or primed, could be used. Other supports, like paper and some textiles and metals, have also been experimented with.

A coat of varnish is often set on to a completed oil painting to prevent any atmospheric attacks, minor abrasions, or an injurious accumulation of dirt. This film of varnish paint can be taken off without damage by experts with use of isopropyl alcohol and other ordinary solvents. The picture varnish also brings the surface to a consistent lustre and takes the tone depth and colour intensity essentially to the vibrancy originally created by the artist in wet paint. Some painters today, particularly those who don’t favour deep, intense colouring, will stay with a mat, or lustreless, finish in their oil paintings.

The majority of oil paintings from previous to the 19th century were built up in layers. The first would be a blank, uniform field of thin paint called a ground. The ground lessened the white gleam of the primer and formed a gentle colour base on which to paint. The forms and figures in the painting would be roughly blocked in with shades of white, as well as gray or neutral green, red, or brown. The eventuating mass of monochromatic shades were known as the underpainting. Forms were defined using either solid paint or scumbles, which are irregular, thinly applied layers of opaque pigment that can create a range of effects. In the completion step, transparent layers of pure colour called glazes then could be utilised to display luminosity, depth, and brilliance to the figures, and highlights could be created with thick, textured patches of paint known as impastos.

Oil as a medium of painting is recorded as early as the 11th century. The technique of easel painting with oil colours, however, stems directly from 15th-century tempera-painting styles. Basic improvements in the refining of linseed oil and the availability of volatile solvents after 1400 coincided with a desire for some medium other than pure egg-yolk tempera, in meeting the contemporary needs of the Renaissance (see tempera painting). At first, oil paints and varnishes would be employed to glaze tempera panels that were painted with a traditional linear draftsmanship. The technically gleaming, crystal-like works by the 15th-century Flemish painter Jan van Eyck, for example, were finished with the new style.

In the 16th century, oil colour became firmly established as the fundamental painting material in Venice. By the 17th century, Venetian artists were proficient in the use of the fundamental characteristics of oil painting, especially in their use of a number of layers of glazes. Canvas, after a long period of growth, replaced wood panels 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 sure brushstrokes have often been adopted, particularly in portraiture. The Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens influenced later painters in the method in which he loaded the light colours opaquely, in juxtaposition to his thin, transparent darks and shadows. A third notable 17th-century master of oil painting was the Dutch painter Rembrandt. In his paintings, a single brushstroke would effectively depict form; cumulative strokes gave great textural depth, combining the rough and the smooth, the thick and the thin. A system of loaded whites and transparent darks would be fully enhanced by glazing, blendings, and highly controlled impastos.

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

The technical requirements of some schools of modern painting cannot be attained by traditional genres and techniques, however, and some abstract painters - including to some extent contemporary painters who use these traditional styles - have expressed a desire for an entirely different plastic flow or viscosity that cannot be created in oil paint and its conventional additives. Some desire a wider range of thick and thin applications and a more rapid rate of drying. Some artists mixed coarsely grained materials with the colours to create texture, some artists are applying oil paints in much heavier thicknesses than is usual, and a large part have favoured acrylic paints, which are more versatile and dry speedily.

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What is Sculpture?

Sculpture is an art in which hard or plastic materials are molded into three-D works of art. The designs may be embodied in freestanding objects, in reliefs on surfaces, or in environments varying from tableaux to contexts surrounding the spectator. A huge variety of media are often 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 is applicable to a permanently restricted category of objects or range of activities. It is, rather, an art that is growing and is changing and continually extends the range of its activities and evolving new designs of objects. The definition of the term grew much wider in the second half of the 20th century than it had been only two or three decades before, and in the evolving state of visual art at the beginning of the 21st century, one simply cannot predict what its future dimensions are going to become.

There are some features which in previous centuries were considered to be essential to the art of sculpture but are now not present in a great deal of modern sculpture and can no longer form part of the definition. One of the most important of these is representation. Prior to the 20th century, sculpture was seen to be a representational art; imitating forms in life, that were most often of human figures but also inanimate objects, such as game, utensils, and books. At the start of the 20th century, however, sculpture also began to include nonrepresentational forms. It has long been accepted that figures of such functional three-D objects as furniture, pots, and buildings may be expressive and beautiful without having to be in any way representational. It was only during the 20th century that nonfunctional, nonrepresentational, three-dimensional art began to be an art form in and of themselves.

Before the 20th century, sculpture was seen as fundamentally an art of solid form, or mass. Whilte the negative elements of sculpture — the voids and hollows inside and between its solid areas — have generally been to some extent an intricate part of any design, but this role was a secondary one. In a great deal of modern sculpture, however, the attention has widened, and the spatial elements have become dominant. Spatial sculpture is currently a generally recognised field of sculpture.

It was also taken for granted in the past ideas of sculpture that its components consisted of a constant shape and size and, excepting items such as Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Diana (a monumental weather vane), should not move. With modern developments of kinetic sculpture, neither the immobility nor immutability of its form can remain to be seen as inherent to the art.

Last, sculpture in the 20th century was no longer restricted to the two traditional forming methods of carving and modeling, or to such traditional natural materials including stone, metal, wood, ivory, bone, and clay. Because contemporary sculptors use any materials and methods of manufacture that work for their purpose, the art can no longer be identified for the use of any particular materials or techniques.

After all this change, there is probably only one thing that remains constant in the art form, and it endures as the key abiding concern of sculptors: the art is a branch of the visual arts that is specially concerned with the creation of works in three-D.

Sculpture may be either in the round or in relief. A sculpture in the round will be a separate, detached object in its own right, with a similar independent existence in reality as a human body or a chair. A sculpture that is in relief does not possess this kind of independence. It is part of and projects from or is an innate part of some object that might serve either as a background for it or a matrix from whence it emerges.

The actual three-dimensionality of sculpture in the round limits its scope in a few respects when compared with the scope of painting. Sculpture will not have the illusion of space with simple optical means, or invest its forms with atmosphere and light as painting can. However, sculpture does possess a realistic experience, a vivid physical presence that is denied in the pictorial arts. Different sculptures can be tangible as well as visible, and they may appeal strongly and directly to both tactile and visual senses. Even the visually impaired, even those who are congenitally blind, can construct and appreciate some pieces of sculpture. It was, in fact, stated by the 20th-century art critic Sir Herbert Read that sculpture should be considered as firstly an art of touch and that the originating roots of sculptural sensibility can be based in the pleasure we experience in doing so.

All three-dimensional forms are seen as possessing an expressive character along with their solely geometric properties. They come across to the observer as delicate, aggressive, flowing, taut, relaxed, dynamic, soft, and so forth. By exploiting the emotive qualities of form, artists are able to create imagery in which subject matter and expressiveness of form are mutually reinforcing. These images go beyond the pure presentation of fact and evoke a wide range of subtle and powerful emotions.

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

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

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