40 Painting Techniques of fine art - ShowFlipper

1. ShowFlipper Presents 40 Painting Techniques of fine art

2. Introduction The following is an alphabetical list of techniques used in Painting. The list comprises devices used to introduce the illusion of three dimensions on a two-dimensional surface, methods of paint application, and different mediums chosen by the artist to create the desired visual effect.

3. What is Painting? Painting, the expression of ideas and emotions, with the creation of certain aesthetic qualities, in a two-dimensional visual language. The elements of this language—its shapes, lines, colours, tones, and textures—are used in various ways to produce sensations of volume, space, movement, and light on a flat surface. These elements are combined into expressive patterns in order to represent real or supernatural phenomena, to interpret a narrative theme, or to create wholly abstract visual relationships. An artist’s decision to use a particular medium, such as tempera, fresco, oil, acrylic, watercolour or other water-based paints, ink, gouache, encaustic, or casein, as well as the choice of a particular form, such as mural, easel, panel, miniature, manuscript illumination, scroll, screen or fan, panorama, or any of a variety of modern forms, is based on the sensuous qualities and the expressive possibilities and limitations of those options. The choices of the medium and the form, as well as the artist’s own technique, combine to realize a unique visual image.

4. Earlier cultural traditions—of tribes, religions, guilds, royal courts, and states—largely controlled the craft, form, imagery, and subject matter of painting and determined its function, whether ritualistic, devotional, decorative, entertaining, or educational. Painters were employed more as skilled artisans than as creative artists. Later the notion of the “fine artist” developed in Asia and Renaissance Europe. Prominent painters were afforded the social status of scholars and courtiers; they signed their work, decided its design and often its subject and imagery, and established a more personal—if not always amicable—relationship with their patrons.

5. During the 19th century painters in Western societies began to lose their social position and secure patronage. Some artists countered the decline in patronage support by holding their own exhibitions and charging an entrance fee. Others earned an income through touring exhibitions of their work. The need to appeal to a marketplace had replaced the similar (if less impersonal) demands of patronage, and its effect on the art itself was probably similar as well. Generally, artists can now reach an audience only through commercial galleries and public museums, although their work may be occasionally reproduced in art periodicals. They may also be assisted by financial awards or commissions from industry and the state. They have, however, gained the freedom to invent their own visual language and to experiment with new forms and unconventional materials and techniques. For example, some painters have combined other media, such as sculpture, with painting to produce three-dimensional abstract designs. 

6.  Other artists have attached real objects to the canvas in collage fashion or used electricity to operate coloured kinetic panels and boxes. Conceptualartists frequently express their ideas in the form of a proposal for an unrealizable project, while performance artists are an integral part of their own compositions. The restless endeavour to extend the boundaries of expression in Western art produces continuous international stylistic changes. The often bewildering succession of new movements in painting is further stimulated by the swift interchange of ideas by means of international art journals, traveling exhibitions, and art centres.

7. What is Acrylic Painting? Acrylic painting, painting executed in the medium of syntheticacrylic resins. Acrylics dry rapidly, serve as a vehicle for any kind of pigment, and are capable of giving both the transparent brilliance of watercolour and the density of oil paint. They are considered to be less affected by heat and other destructive forces than is oil paint. They found favour among artists who were concerned about the health risks posed by the handling of oil paints and the inhalation of fumes associated with them. Because of all these desirable characteristics, acrylic paints became immediately popular with artists when they were first commercially promoted in the 1960s. Notable 20th-century artists who used acrylic paint include Pop artists Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, Op artist Bridget Riley, colour field artists Mark Rothko, Ellsworth Kelly, and Barnett Newman, and British artist David Hockney.

8. What is Action Painting? Action painting, direct, instinctual, and highly dynamic kind of art that involves the spontaneous application of vigorous, sweeping brushstrokes and the chance effects of dripping and spilling paint onto the canvas. The term was coined by the American art critic Harold Rosenberg to characterize the work of a group of American Abstract Expressionists who utilized the method from about 1950. Action painting is distinguished from the carefully preconceived work of the “abstract imagists” and “colour-field” painters, which constitutes the other major direction implicit in Abstract Expressionismand resembles Action painting only in its absolute devotion to unfettered personal expression free of all traditional aesthetic and social values.

9. The works of the Action painters Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Bradley Walker Tomlin, and Jack Tworkov reflect the influence of the “automatic” techniques developed in Europe in the 1920s and ’30s by the Surrealists. While Surrealistautomatism, which consisted of scribblings recorded without the artist’s conscious control, was primarily designed to awaken unconscious associations in the viewer, the automatic approach of the Action painters was primarily conceived as a means of giving the artist’s instinctive creative forces free play and of revealing these forces directly to the viewer. In Action painting the act of painting itself, being the moment of the artist’s creative interaction with his materials, was as significant as the finished work.

10. It is generally recognized that Jackson Pollock’s abstract drip paintings, executed from 1947, opened the way to the bolder, gestural techniques that characterize Action painting. The vigorous brushstrokes of de Kooning’s “Woman” series, begun in the early 1950s, successfully evolved a richly emotive expressive style. Action painting was of major importance throughout the 1950s in Abstract Expressionism, the most-influential art movement at the time in the United States. By the end of the decade, however, leadership of the movement had shifted to the colour-field and abstract imagist painters, whose followers in the 1960s rebelled against the irrationality of the Action painters. See alsoTachism.

11. What is Aerial Perspective? Aerial perspective, also called atmospheric perspective, method of creating the illusion of depth, or recession, in a painting or drawing by modulating colour to simulate changes effected by the atmosphere on the colours of things seen at a distance. Although the use of aerial perspective has been known since antiquity, Leonardo da Vinci first used the term aerial perspective in his Treatise on Painting, in which he wrote: “Colours become weaker in proportion to their distance from the person who is looking at them.” It was later discovered that the presence in the atmosphere of moisture and of tiny particles of dust and similar material causes a scattering of light as it passes through them, the degree of scattering being dependent on the wavelength, which corresponds to the colour, of the light. Because light of short wavelength—blue light—is scattered most, the colours of all distant dark objects tend toward blue; for example, distant mountains have a bluish cast. Light of long wavelength—red light—is scattered least; thus, distant bright objects appear redder because some of the blue is scattered and lost from the light by which they are seen.

12. The intervening atmosphere between a viewer and, for example, distant mountains, creates other visual effects that can be mimicked by landscape painters. The atmosphere causes distant forms to have less distinct edges and outlines than forms near the viewer, and interior detail is similarly softened or blurred. Distant objects appear somewhat lighter than objects of similar tone lying closer at hand, and in general contrasts between light and shade appear less extreme at great distances. All these effects are more apparent at the base of a mountain than at its peak, since the density of the intervening atmosphere is greater at lower elevations.

13. Examples of aerial perspective have been found in ancient Greco-Roman wall paintings. The techniques were lost from European art during the “Dark” and Middle Ages and were rediscovered by Flemish painters of the 15th century (such as Joachim Patinir), after which they became a standard element in the European painter’s technical vocabulary. The 19th-century British landscape painter J.M.W. Turner made perhaps the boldest and most ambitious use of aerial perspective among Western artists. Aerial perspective was used with great sophistication and pictorial effectiveness by Chinese landscape painters from about the 8th century on.

14. What is Anamorphosis? Anamorphosis, in the visual arts, an ingenious perspective technique that gives a distorted image of the subject represented in a picture when seen from the usual viewpoint but so executed that if viewed from a particular angle, or reflected in a curved mirror, the distortion disappears and the image in the picture appears normal. Derived from the Greek word meaning “to transform,” the term anamorphosis was first employed in the 17th century, although this technique had been one of the more curious by-products of the discovery of perspective in the 14th and 15th centuries.

15. The first examples appear in Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks. It was regarded as a display of technical virtuosity, and it was included in most 16th- and 17th-century drawing manuals. Two important examples of anamorphosis are a portrait of Edward VI (1546) that has been attributed to William Scrots, and a skull in the foreground of Hans Holbein the Younger’s painting of Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve, The Ambassadors (1533). Many examples are provided with special peepholes through which can be seen the rectified view that first eluded the viewer.

16. A modern equivalent of anamorphosis is the so-called Ames Room, in which people and objects are distorted by manipulation of the contours of the room in which they are seen. This and other aspects of anamorphosis received a good deal of attention in the 20th century from psychologists interested in perception.

17. Artists and architects in the 21st century continued to experiment with anamorphic designs. In 2014 Swiss artist FeliceVarini—known for large-scale anamorphic installations—created Three Ellipses for Three Locks, for which he painted three ellipses, segments of which covered roads, walls, and nearly 100 buildings in the historic centre of the city of Hasselt, Belgium. The design became coherent only when viewed from a particular vantage point in the city.

18. What is Camaieu? Camaieu, plural camaieux, painting technique by which an image is executed either entirely in shades or tints of a single colour or in several hues unnatural to the object, figure, or scene represented. When a picture is monochromatically rendered in gray, it is called grisaille; when in yellow, cirage. Originating in the ancient world, camaieu was used in miniature painting to simulate cameos and in architectural decoration to simulate relief sculpture.

19. What is Casein Painting? Casein painting, painting executed with colours ground in a solution of casein, a phosphoprotein of milk precipitated by heating with an acid or by lactic acid in souring. In the form of homemade curd made from soured skim milk, it has been a traditional adhesive and binder for more than eight centuries. Refined, pure, powdered casein, which can be dissolved with ammonia, has been used for easel and mural paintings since the latter 19th and early 20th centuries, and, more recently, ready-made casein paints in tubes have come into very wide use. An advantage of casein painting is that it can create effects that approach those of oil painting. It permits the use of bristle brushes and a moderate impasto, like oil painting, but not the fusion of tones. It is preferred by some because of speedy drying and matte effects. When dry, the paint becomes water resistant to a considerable degree. Casein paintings may be varnished to further resemble oil paintings, and they are frequently glazed or overpainted with oil colours. Because casein is too brittle for canvas, it must be applied to rigid boards or panels.

20. What is Chiaroscuro? Chiaroscuro, (from Italian: chiaro, “light,” and scuro, “dark”) technique employed in the visual arts to represent light and shadow as they define three-dimensional objects. Some evidence exists that ancient Greek and Roman artists used chiaroscuro effects, but in European painting the technique was first brought to its full potential by Leonardo da Vinci in the late 15th century in such paintings as his Adoration of the Magi (1481). Thereafter, chiaroscuro became a primary technique for many painters, and by the late 17th century the term was routinely used to describe any painting, drawing, or print that depended for its effect on an extensive gradation of light and darkness.

21. In its most dramatic form—as in the works of those Italian artists of the 17th century who came under the influence of Caravaggio—it was known as tenebrismo, or tenebrism. Caravaggio and his followers used a harsh, dramatic light to isolate their figures and heighten their emotional tension. Another outstanding master of chiaroscuro was Rembrandt, who used it with remarkable psychological effect in his paintings, drawings, and etchings. Peter Paul Rubens, Diego Velázquez, and many other, lesser painters of the Baroque period also used chiaroscuro to great effect. The delicacy and lightness of 18th-century Rococo painting represents a rejection of this dramatic use of chiaroscuro, but the technique again became popular with artists of the Romantic period, who relied upon it to create the emotive effects they considered essential to their art.

22. In the graphic arts, the term chiaroscuro refers to a particular technique for making a woodcut print in which effects of light and shade are produced by printing each tone from a different wood block. The technique was first used in woodcuts in Italy in the 16th century, probably by the printmaker Ugoda Carpi. To make a chiaroscuro woodcut, the key block was inked with the darkest tone and printed first. Subsequent blocks were inked with progressively lighter tones and carefully measured to print in register with the key block. Chiaroscuro woodcuts are printed in only one colour, brown, gray, green, and sepia being preferred. The process attempted to imitate wash and watercolour drawings and also became popular as an inexpensive method of reproducing paintings.

23. What is Divisionism? Divisionism, in painting, the practice of separating colour into individual dots or strokes of pigment. It formed the technical basis for Neo-Impressionism. Following the rules of contemporary colour theory, Neo-Impressionist artists such as Georges Seurat and Paul Signac applied contrasting dots of colour side by side so that, when seen from a distance, these dots would blend and be perceived by the retina as a luminous whole. Whereas the term divisionism refers to this separation of colour and its optical effects, the term pointillism refers specifically to the technique of applying dots.

24. What is Easel Painting? Easel painting, painting executed on a portable support such as a panel or canvas, instead of on a wall. It is likely that easel paintings were known to the ancient Egyptians, and the 1st-century-ADRoman scholar Pliny the Elder refers to a large panel placed on an easel; it was not until the 13th century, however, that easel paintings became relatively common, finally superseding in popularity the mural, or wall painting.

25. What is Encaustic Painting? Encaustic painting, painting technique in which pigments are mixed with hot liquid wax. Artists can change the paint’s consistency by adding resin or oil (the latter for use on canvas) to the wax. After the paint has been applied to the support, which is usually made of wood, plaster, or canvas, a heating element is passed over the surface until the individual brush or spatula marks fuse into a uniform film. This “burning in” of the colours is an essential element of the true encaustic technique.

26. Encaustic wax has many of the properties of oil paint: it can give a very brilliant and attractive effect and offers great scope for elegant and expressive brushwork. The practical difficulties of using a medium that has to be kept warm are considerable, though. Apart from the greater sophistication of modern methods of heating, the present-day technique is similar to that described by the 1st-century-CE Roman scholar Pliny the Elder. Encaustic painting was invented by the ancient Greeks and was brought to the peak of its technical perfection by the genre painter Pausias in the 4th century BCE.

27. What is Foreshortening? Foreshortening, method of rendering a specific object or figure in a picture in depth. The artist records, in varying degrees, the distortion that is seen by the eye when an object or figure is viewed at a distance or at an unusual angle. In a photograph of a recumbent figure positioned so that the feet are nearest the camera, for instance, the feet will seem unnaturally large and those body parts at a distance, such as the head, unnaturally small. The artist may either record this effect exactly, producing a startling illusion of reality that seems to violate the picture plane (surface of the picture), or modify it, slightly reducing the relative size of the nearer part of the object, so as to make a less-aggressive assault on the viewer’s eye and to relate the foreshortened object more harmoniously to the rest of the picture.

28. Insofar as foreshortening is basically concerned with the persuasive projection of a form in an illusionistic way, it is a type of perspective, but the term foreshortening is almost invariably used in relation to a single object, or part of an object, rather than to a scene or group of objects.

29. What is Fresco Painting? Fresco painting, method of painting water-based pigments on freshly applied plaster, usually on wall surfaces. The colours, which are made by grinding dry-powder pigments in pure water, dry and set with the plaster to become a permanent part of the wall. Fresco painting is ideal for making murals because it lends itself to a monumental style, is durable, and has a matte surface.

30. What is Gouache? Gouache, painting technique in which a gum or an opaque white pigment is added to watercolours to produce opacity. In watercolour the tiny particles of pigment become enmeshed in the fibre of the paper; in gouache the colour lies on the surface of the paper, forming a continuous layer, or coating. A gouache is characterized by a directly reflecting brilliance. When applied with bristle brushes it is possible to achieve a slight but effective impasto (thick-coated) quality; with sable brushes, a smooth, flawless colour field is obtained.

31. A painting technique of great antiquity, gouache was used by the Egyptians. It was a popular medium with Rococo artists such as François Boucher (1703–70). Contemporary painters use gouache alone or in combination with watercolour and other mediums.

32. What is Graffiti? Graffiti, form of visual communication, usually illegal, involving the unauthorized marking of public space by an individual or group. Although the common image of graffiti is a stylistic symbol or phrase spray-painted on a wall by a member of a street gang, some graffiti is not gang-related. Graffiti can be understood as antisocial behaviour performed in order to gain attention or as a form of thrill seeking, but it also can be understood as an expressive art form.

33. Derived from the Italian word graffio (“scratch”), graffiti (“incised inscriptions,” plural but often used as singular) has a long history. For example, markings have been found in ancient Roman ruins, in the remains of the Mayan city of Tikal in Central America, on rocks in Spain dating to the 16th century, and in medieval English churches. During the 20th century, graffiti in the United States and Europe was closely associated with gangs, who used it for a variety of purposes: for identifying or claiming territory, for memorializing dead gang members in an informal “obituary,” for boasting about acts (e.g., crimes) committed by gang members, and for challenging rival gangs as a prelude to violent confrontations. 

34. Graffiti was particularly prominent in major urban centres throughout the world, especially in the United States and Europe; common targets were subways, billboards, and walls. In the 1990s there emerged a new form of graffiti, known as “tagging,” which entailed the repeated use of a single symbol or series of symbols to mark territory. In order to attract the most attention possible, this type of graffiti usually appeared in strategically or centrally located neighbourhoods.

35. To some observers graffiti is a form of public art, continuing the tradition, for example, of the muralscommissioned by the U.S. Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project during the Great Depression and the work of Diego Rivera in Mexico. Like the murals of these artists, great works of graffiti can beautify a neighbourhood and speak to the interests of a specific community. For example, the graffiti in many Hispanic neighbourhoods in the United States is quite elaborate and is regarded by many as a form of urban art. The question of whether such work is an innovative art form or a public nuisance has aroused much debate.

36. Graffiti became notoriously prominent in New York City in the late 20th century. Large elaborate multicoloured graffiti created with spray paint on building walls and subway cars came to define the urban landscape. The art world’s fascination with artists who functioned outside traditional gallery channels stimulated an interest in this form of self-expression. In the 1980s New York artists such as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat gained notoriety for their graffiti and parlayed this recognition into successful careers as painters represented by top galleries.

37. Most jurisdictions have laws prohibiting graffiti as vandalism, and in some countries punishment is quite severe. For example, in Singapore violators are subject to caning. During the 1980s and ’90s many jurisdictions sought ways to eliminate and remove graffiti, fearing that it would otherwise lead to the debasement of the community. Significant resources were allocated for abatement and other clean-up efforts, and some cities even introduced mural programs or “free walls” to provide legal opportunities for urban youths to express their artistic creativity.

38. What is Grisaille? Grisaille, painting technique by which an image is executed entirely in shades of gray and usually severely modeled to create the illusion of sculpture, especially relief. This aspect of grisaille was used particularly by the 15th-century Flemish painters (as in the outer wings of the van Eycks’ Ghent Altarpiece) and in the late 18th century to imitate classical sculpture in wall and ceiling decoration. Among glass painters, grisaille is the name of a gray, vitreous pigment used in the art of colouring glass for stained glass. In French, grisaille has also come to mean any painting technique in which translucent oil colours are laid over a monotone underpainting.

39. In the grisaille enamel painting technique, pulverized white vitreous enamel is made into a paste by mixing it with water, turpentine, oil of lavender, or petroleum oil and is then applied to a dark enamel ground, usually coloured black or blue. Lighter areas of the design are thickly painted, while the gray areas are obtained by painting with thinner coats to allow the dark background colour to tone the white enamel pigment. This technique achieves a dramatic effect of light and shade and a pronounced sense of three-dimensionality. Grisaille enamels were developed in the 16th century in France by the Limoges school of enamelers. Among the most noted practitioners of this technique were members of the Pénicaud family. The technique was also popular with some 20th-century painters, including Alfred Leslie and Chuck Close.

40. What is Impasto? Impasto, paint that is applied to a canvas or panel in quantities that make it stand out from the surface. Impasto was used frequently to mimic the broken-textured quality of highlights—i.e., the surfaces of objects that are struck by an intense light. Impasto came into its own in the 17th century, when such Baroque painters as Rembrandt, Frans Hals, and Diego Velázquez used skillfully and minutely worked impastos to depict lined and wrinkled skin or the sparkle of elaborately crafted armour, jewelry, and rich fabrics. The 19th-century painter Vincent van Gogh made notable use of impastos, building up and defining the forms in his paintings with thick, nervous dabs of paint. Twentieth-century painters such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning often applied impastos with a dynamism and a gestural bravura that emphasized the physical qualities of the paint itself. Since then, raw pigments applied thickly to a canvas have become a staple technique of modern abstract and semifigurativepainting.

41. What is Miniature Painting? Miniature painting, also called (16th–17th century) limning, small, finely wrought portrait executed on vellum, prepared card, copper, or ivory. The name is derived from the minium, or red lead, used by the medieval illuminators. Arising from a fusion of the separate traditions of the illuminated manuscriptand the medal, miniature painting flourished from the beginning of the 16th century down to the mid-19th century.

42. What is Mural? Mural, a painting applied to and made integral with the surface of a wall or ceiling. The term may properly include painting on fired tiles but ordinarily does not refer to mosaic decoration unless the mosaic forms part of the overall scheme of the painting.

43. What is Oil Painting? Oil painting, painting in oil colours, a medium consisting of pigments suspended in drying oils. The outstanding facility with which fusion of tones or colour is achieved makes it unique among fluid painting mediums; at the same time, satisfactory linear treatment and crisp effects are easily obtained. Opaque, transparent, and translucent painting all lie within its range, and it is unsurpassed for textural variation.

44. What is Panel Painting? Panel painting, painting executed on a rigid support—ordinarily wood or metal—as distinct from painting done on canvas. Before canvas came into general use at the end of the 16th century, the panel was the support most often used for easel painting. A variety of woods have been used, including beech, cedar, chestnut, fir, larch, linden, white poplar, mahogany, olive, dark walnut, and teak. Wooden panels were usually boiled or steamed to remove gum and resin and thereby prevent splitting and then were coated with size (a glutinous material) to fill pores and with gesso (a mixture of glue and whiting), on which the painting was executed. Metals used for panel paintings include silver, tin, lead, and zinc.

45. During the Middle Ages, especially in Russia during the period encompassing the work of the Novgorod school (12th–16th century), paintings were executed on panels over which leather had been stretched. Panels were especially popular for making decorative altarpieces. Siennese artist Duccio, Flemish artists Robert Campin, Rogier van der Weyden, and brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck, and German artist Matthias Grünewald are notable for their panel altarpieces.

46. What is Panorama? Panorama, in the visual arts, continuous narrative scene or landscape painted to conform to a flat or curved background, which surrounds or is unrolled before the viewer.

47. What is Perspective? Perspective, method of graphically depicting three-dimensional objects and spatial relationships on a two-dimensional plane or on a plane that is shallower than the original (for example, in flat relief). Perceptual methods of representing space and volume, which render them as seen at a particular time and from a fixed position and are characteristic of Chinese and most Western painting since the Renaissance, are in contrast to conceptual methods. Pictures drawn by young children and primitives (untrained artists), many paintings of cultures such as ancient Egypt and Crete, India, Islam, and pre-Renaissance Europe, as well as the paintings of many modern artists, depict objects and surroundings independently of one another—as they are known to be, rather than as they are seen to be—and from the directions that best present their most characteristic features. Many Egyptian and Cretan paintings and drawings, for example, show the head and legs of a figure in profile, while the eye and torso are shown frontally (seephotograph). This system produces not the illusion of depth but the sense that objects and their surroundings have been compressed within a shallow space behind the picture plane.

48. In Western art, illusions of perceptual volume and space are generally created by use of the linear perspectival system, based on the observations that objects appear to the eye to shrink and parallel lines and planes to converge to infinitely distant vanishing points as they recede in space from the viewer. Parallel lines in spatial recession will appear to converge on a single vanishing point, called one-point perspective. Perceptual space and volume may be simulated on the picture plane by variations on this basic principle, differing according to the number and location of the vanishing points. Instead of one-point (or central) perspective, the artist may use, for instance, angular (or oblique) perspective, which employs two vanishing points.

49. Another kind of system—parallel perspective combined with a viewpoint from above—is traditional in Chinese painting. When buildings rather than natural contours are painted and it is necessary to show the parallel horizontal lines of the construction, parallel lines are drawn parallel instead of converging, as in linear perspective. Often foliage is used to crop these lines before they extend far enough to cause a building to appear warped.

50. The early European artist used a perspective that was an individual interpretation of what he saw rather than a fixed mechanical method. At the beginning of the Italian Renaissance, early in the 15th century, the mathematical laws of perspective were discovered by the architect Filippo Brunelleschi, who worked out some of the basic principles, including the concept of the vanishing point, which had been known to the Greeks and Romans but had been lost. These principles were applied in painting by Masaccio (as in his Trinity fresco in Santa Maria Novella, Florence; c. 1427), who within a short period brought about an entirely new approach in painting.