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Water colour is a kind 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 a work of art executed in this medium. The pigment is ordinarily 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 mixed with casein, a phosphoprotein of milk.

Watercolour compares 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 apply one opaque colour over another until he has made his preferred result. The whites are created with opaque white. The watercolourist’s approach is the complete. In essence, instead of adding in he leaves out. The white paper creates the whites. The darker accents are applied 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 thinned with water. The more water in the wash, the more the paper influences the colours; for example, vermilion, a warm red, will eventually turn into a cool pink as it is diluted with more water.

The dry-brush technique, the use of the brush containing pigment but little water, dragged over the coarse surface of the paper—creates various granular effects similar to those of crayon drawing. Entire compositions can be made in this way. This technique may also be used over dull washes to enliven them.

Three hundred years before the golden age of late 18th-century English watercolourists, Albrecht Dürer had anticipated their technique 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 studies for oil paintings.

The most well known formulators 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 made use of rags, sponges, and knives to create unique effects of light and texture. Victorian artists, such as Birket Foster, used a time consuming 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 fully established in Europe and America as an expressive artistic 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 damp paper. Parts of white paper are left unpainted to represent white objects and to create effects of reflected light. These flecks of untouched paper produce the sparkle characteristic of pure watercolour. Tonal gradations and soft, atmospheric qualities are formed by staining the paper when it is very wet with varying proportions of pigment. Sharp accents, lines, and coarse textures are introduced when 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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Artists’ oil colours are put together by adding dry powder pigments with selected refined linseed oil to a stiff paste texture and grinding it under strong friction in steel roller mills. The perfection of the colour is fundamental. The common feel is a smooth, buttery paste, and not stringy or long or tacky. When a more flowing or mobile style is desired by the artist, a liquid painting medium such as pure gum turpentine has to be combined with it. If the artist wishes to speed up drying, a siccative, or liquid drier, can be sometimes used.

Top-grade brushes are manufactured in two styles: red sable (with hair from varying members of weasel) and bleached hog bristles. Both are manufactured in in numbered sizes for four regular shapes: round (pointed), flat, bright (flat shape but is shorter and not as supple), and oval (flat but is bluntly pointed). Red sable brushes are commonly used for a smoother, more delicate style of brushstroking. The painting knife, a thinly tempered, limber version of a palette knife, is a common item for painting oil colours in a robust way.

The common support for an oil painting is a canvas manufactured of pure European linen of stable close weave. The canvas is cut to the necessary size and cast over a frame, commonly a wooden frame, and then secured with tacks or, since the 20th century, by use of staples. If the artist needs to reduce the absorbency of the canvas fabric itself and attain a smooth surface, a primer or ground can be applied and is allowed to dry before painting begins. The most commonly found primers are gesso, rabbit-skin glue, and lead white. If stiffness and a smooth consistency are preferred over elasticity and texture, a wooden or processed paperboard panel, sized or primed, must be employed. Lots of other supports, for example paper and some textiles and metals, have been tried out.

A coat of paint varnish is often put on to a completed oil painting to prevent atmospheric attacks, minor abrasions, or an harmful accumulation of dirt. This painting varnish could be removed without damaging the painting by experts with isopropyl alcohol and other such ordinary solvents. The varnish also brings the surface to a full lustre and brings the tone and colour intensity essentially to the level originally formed by the artist in the wet paint. Some modern painters, especially those who don’t favour deep, intense colouring, will stay with a mat, or lustreless, finish in the paintings.

The majority of oil paintings dating before the 19th century were built up in layers. The first was a blank, uniform field of thin paint called a ground. The ground lessened the white gleam of the primer and established a base of colour on which to apply oil paint. The forms and items in the painting were then roughly blocked in by using shades of white, and gray or neutral green, red, or brown. The ultimate mass of monochromatic light and dark colours were known as the underpainting. Forms could be defined by using either the paint or scumbles; non-uniform, thinly applied layers of opaque pigment that imparts a lot of effects. At the final point, transparent layers of pure colour known as glazes would then be used to cast luminosity, depth, and brilliance to the objects, and highlights could then be defined with thick, textured patches of paint known as impastos.

Oil as a painting medium is chronologised circa the 11th century. The method of easel painting with oil colours, however, resulted directly from 15th-century tempera-painting methods. Simple improvements in refining linseed oil and the availability of volatile solvents after 1400 coincided with a desire for a medium other than pure egg-yolk tempera, in meeting the contemporary needs of the Renaissance (see tempera painting). Originally, oil paints and varnishes had been used to glaze tempera panels that had been painted from their usual linear draftsmanship. The technically brilliant, jewel-like works of the 15th-century Flemish artist Jan van Eyck, for example, were finished in this new technique.

In the 16th century, oil colour became established as the fundamental painting material in Venice. From then on, Venetian painters were proficient in the use of the essential aspects of oil painting, notably in employing a number of layers of glazes. Canvas of linen, after a long time of growth, replaced wood panels as the preferred support.

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

Other basic influences on later easel painting techniques are the smooth, thinly painted, deliberately planned, tight methods. A great many admired works (e.g., those from Johannes Vermeer) were executed with smooth blends of colours to create subtly shadowed forms and delicate colour variations.

The technical requirements of some schools of modern painting cannot be achieved with traditional genres and techniques, however. Some abstract painters - including a few modern traditionally-geared painters - have shown a desire for a plastic flow or viscosity that cannot be had with oil paint and its conventional additives. Some desire a larger range of thick or thin applications and a more rapid rate of drying. Some artists mixed coarsely grained materials with their colours to create textures, some of them have applied oil paints in much greater thicknesses than ever before, and lots have begun to favour acrylic paints, as they are more versatile and dry quickly.

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Sculpture is an art form in which hard or plastic materials are worked into three-dimensional items. The designs may be embodied in freestanding objects, in reliefs on surfaces, or in environments that range from tableaux to contexts enveloping the spectator. A variety of media are often used, including clay, wax, stone, metal, fabric, glass, wood, plaster, rubber, and random “found” objects. Materials may be carved, modeled, molded, cast, wrought, welded, sewn, assembled, or purely shaped and combined.

Sculpture is not a fixed name that can be applied to a permanently circumscribed category of objects or set of activities. It is, rather, an art that is growing and changes and continually extends the range of forms and evolving new kinds of objects. The breadth of the term was much wider in the second half of the 20th century than it had been merely two or three decades before, and in the evolving state of the visual arts at the turn of the 21st century, it is impossible to predict what its future extensions are going to become.

There are certain features which in previous centuries were regarded as essential to the sculpturing art but are now no longer present in a big part of modern sculpture and can no longer form part of a definition. One of the most significant of these is representation. Prior to the 20th century, sculpture was considered a representational art; imitating forms in life, mostly human figures but also inanimate objects, like game, utensils, and books. Since the beginning of the 20th century, however, sculpture has also included nonrepresentational forms. It became accepted that the forms of such functional 3-D objects as furniture, pots, and buildings could be expressive and beautiful without having to be representational. It was only from the 20th century that nonfunctional, nonrepresentational, 3-D works of art began to be an art form in and of themselves.

Prior to the 20th century, sculpture was regarded as primarily an art of solid form, or mass. Though the negative elements of sculpture — the voids and hollows inside and between its solid areas — have usually been to some degree an inextricable part of the design, but this role was unacknowledged. In a large part of modern sculpture, however, the attention has broadened, and the spatial aspects have come to be dominant. Spatial sculpture is currently a wholly recognised field of sculpture.

It was also taken for granted in the sculpture of the past that its components had to be of a constant shape and size and, with the exception of items such as Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Diana (a monumental weather vane), would not move. With the recent development of kinetic sculpture, neither the immobility nor immutability of its design can still be viewed as fundamental to the art of sculpture.

Last, sculpture since the 20th century has not been limited to the two traditional forming procedures of carving and modeling, or to the traditional natural materials as stone, metal, wood, ivory, bone, and clay. Because modern sculptors might use any materials and methods of manufacture that work for their purpose, the definition of the art can no longer be identified with any particular kind of materials or techniques.

With all this change, there is probably just one area that stays constant in sculpture, and it emerges as the central abiding concern of sculptors: the art form is a field of the visual arts that is particularly concerned with the creation of objects in 3-D.

Sculpture can be either in the round or in relief. A sculpture in the round consists of a separate, detached item in its own right, possessing the same kind of independent existence in space as a human body or a chair. A sculpture in relief does not possess this independance. It is part of and projects from or is an integral part of some object that might serve either as a background to it or a matrix from which it emerges.

The actual 3-D nature of sculpture in the round restricts its scope in a few respects in comparison with the scope of painting. Sculpture does not have the illusion of space by solely optical means, or invest its shape with atmosphere and light as painting might. However, sculpture does proffer a reality, a vivid physical presence that is denied to the pictorial arts. Different sculptures can be tangible as well as visible, and they can appeal strongly and directly to our tactile and visual sense. Even the visually impaired, including those who are congenitally blind, can construct and appreciate different types of sculpture. It was, in fact, stated by the 20th-century art critic Sir Herbert Read that sculpture should be regarded as primarily an art of touch and that the first roots of sculptural sensibility can be based in the pleasure that we experience in doing this.

All 3D forms are perceived as having an expressive character as well as pure geometric properties. They are seen by the observer as delicate, aggressive, flowing, taut, relaxed, dynamic, soft, and so on. By exploiting the evocative qualities of form, artists are able to create imagery in which subject matter and expressiveness of form are mutually reinforcing. Such images can go beyond the simplistic presentation of fact and impress a vast range of subtle and powerful emotions.

The aesthetic raw material for sculpture is, so to speak, the whole realm of expressive 3-D form. A sculpture can draw upon what we see exists in the endless range of natural and man-made form, or it may be an art of pure invention. It has been used to express a huge range of human emotions and feelings from the most tender and delicate to the highly violent and ecstatic.

All human beings, intimately involved from birth with the world of 3-D form, know something of its structural and expressive elements and will develop emotional reactions to them. This combination of intellect and reaction, called a sense of form, may be cultivated and refined. It is to that sense of form that this art primarily appeals.

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