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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 an artwork 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 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. 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 an opaque white. The watercolourist’s approach is the complete. 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 comes out of the tube or with very little water mixed with it. Otherwise the colours are thinned with water. The greater amount of water in the wash, the more the paper affects the colours; for example, vermilion, a warm red, will gradually 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 a crayon drawing. Entire compositions can be produced in this way. This technique also may be used over darker washes to enliven them.

Three hundred years before the Renaissance 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 preliminary sketches for oil paintings.

The main leaders 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 obtain unique 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 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 colour is applied, colour intensity and tonal depth being built up by successive, transparent washes on damp paper. Parts of white paper are left untouched to represent white objects and to create effects of reflected light. These flecks of white 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 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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Artists’ oil colours are created by stirring dry powder pigments with particular refined linseed oil until the substance reaches a stiff paste consistency and grinding it with strong friction in steel roller mills. The perfection of the shade is fundamental. The usual feel is a smooth, buttery paste, as opposed to stringy or long or tacky. When a more flowing or mobile quality is required by the artist, a liquid painting medium such as pure gum turpentine needs to be combined with the substance. If the artist wants to accelerate drying, a siccative, or liquid drier, may be sometimes used.

Top-class brushes are available in two types: red sable (from various members of the weasel family) and chemically whitened hog bristles. They both are manufactured in in numbered sizes for four regular shapes: round (pointed), flat, bright (flat but shorter and less supple), and oval (flat shape but bluntly pointed). Red sable brushes are generally used for smoother, less robust kind of brushwork. The painting knife, a thinly tempered, limber version of a artist’s palette knife, is a useful tool for painting oil colours in a robust way.

The generic support for oil painting is a canvas created from pure European linen of strong close weave. The canvas is cut to the necessary size and stretched over a frame, often wood, and then secured by tacks or, since the 20th century, by staples. If the artist desires to reduce the absorbency of the canvas itself and achieve a glossy surface, a primer or ground might be applied and is left to dry prior to painting. The most usually seen primers are gesso, rabbit-skin glue, and lead white. If density and a smooth consistency are preferred rather than springiness and texture, a wooden or processed paperboard panel, sized or primed, would be used. Other supports, including paper and different textiles and metals, have been attempted.

A polish of varnish is commonly put on to a completed oil painting to prevent any atmospheric attacks, minor abrasions, or an injurious accumulation of dirt. This film of varnish can be taken off without damaging the painting by experts with use of isopropyl alcohol and other such ordinary solvents. The picture varnish also sets the surface to a uniform lustre and takes the tonal depth and colour intensity basically to the level first created by the artist in wet paint. Some painters today, particularly those who don’t favour deep, intense colouring, and stay with a mat, or lustreless, finish in the oil paintings.

Many oil paintings from prior to the 19th century were created in layers. The first would be a blank, uniform field of thin paint called a ground. The ground subdued the white gleam of the primer and formed a gentle base on which to start painting. The forms and items in the painting would then be roughly blocked in with shades of white, as well as gray or neutral green, red, or brown. The eventuating mass of monochromatic light and dark were called the underpainting. Forms were then given definition with either solid paint or scumbles; irregular, thinly applied layers of opaque pigment that creates a whole lot of visual effects. In the completion step, transparent layers of pure colour called glazes were then utilised to cast luminosity, depth, and brilliance to the shapes, and highlights would then be imparted with thick, textured patches of paint known as impastos.

Oil as a painting medium is dated back to the 11th century. The technique of easel painting with oil colours, however, stems directly from 15th-century tempera-painting methods. Basic improvements in refining linseed oil and the availability of volatile solvents from 1400 coincided with a requirement for mediums other than pure egg-yolk tempera, in meeting the contemporary needs of the Renaissance (see tempera painting). At first, oil paints and varnishes were employed to glaze tempera panelswhich had been painted in a traditional linear draftsmanship. The technically vibrant, crystal-like portraits from the 15th-century Flemish painter Jan van Eyck, for example, were done in this way.

During the 16th century, oil paint became firmly established as the ultimate painting material in Venice. By the end of the century, Venetian painters were proficient in utilising the fundamental aspects of oil painting, particularly in their use of a number of layers of glaze. Linen canvas, after a long era of growth, topped wooden panels as the preferred support.

One of the 17th-century masters of the oil technique was Velázquez, a Spanish painter in the Venetian tradition, whose highly economical but certain brushstrokes have often been repeated, particularly in portraiture. The Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens challenged the norm 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 works, a single brushstroke would effectively depict form; cumulative strokes created great textural depth, combining the rough and the smooth, the thick and the thin. A system of loaded whites and transparent darks is then enhanced by glaze, blendings, and highly controlled impastos.

Other particular influences on easel painting are the smooth, thinly painted, deliberately planned, tight styles. A great many admired works (e.g., like those from Johannes Vermeer) were formed with smooth blends of shades 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. Many abstract painters - as well as to some extent modern traditional painters - have shown a desire for a wholly different plastic flow or viscosity that cannot be created with oil paint and its conventional additives. Some need a larger variation of thick or thin applications and a more expedient rate of drying. Some have mixed coarsely grained substances with their colours to create texture, some are using oil paints in greater volume than ever before, and lots have started using acrylic paints, as they are more versatile and dry rapidly.

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Sculpture is an art form in which hard or plastic materials are molded into three-dimensional objects. The designs may be embodied in freestanding objects, in reliefs on surfaces, or in environments ranging from tableaux to contexts around the spectator. A variety of materials may be 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 otherwise shaped and combined.

Sculpture is not a fixed label that applies to a permanently standing category of objects or set of activities. It is, rather, an art that is growing and changes and is continually extending the range of activities and evolving new kinds of objects. The breadth of the term became much wider in the second half of the 20th century than as it had been merely two or three decades prior, and in the fluid state of art at the start of the 21st century, it is impossible to predict what its future dimensions are going to become.

There are some features which in previous centuries were thought to be essential to the sculpturing art but are now not present in a great deal of modern sculpture and thus no longer form part of its definition. One of the most significant of these is representation. Before the 20th century, sculpture was seen as a representational art; an imitation of forms in life, that were most often of human figures but also inanimate objects, including game, utensils, and books. At the beginning of the 20th century, however, sculpture also included nonrepresentational forms. It has long been accepted that the forms of such functional three-D objects as furniture, pots, and buildings may be expressive and beautiful without being in any way representational. It was only in the 20th century that nonfunctional, nonrepresentational, 3-D art began to be common practice.

Before 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 parts — have usually been to some degree an integral part of any design, but that role was purely secondary. In a good deal of modern sculpture, however, the attention has widened, and the spatial elements have come out as dominant. Spatial sculpture is currently a wholly acknowledged branch of sculpture.

It was also taken for granted in sculpture in the past that its components consisted 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 contemporary development of kinetic sculpture, neither the immobility nor immutability of its form can any longer be seen as inherent to the definition of the art.

Additionally, sculpture since the 20th century was not limited to the two traditional forming procedures of carving and modeling, or to such traditional natural materials as stone, metal, wood, ivory, bone, and clay. As modern sculptors use any materials and methods of manufacture that can be used, the art form can no longer be identified for the use of any particular materials or techniques.

During all this evolution, there is probably just one thing that has remained constant in the art of sculpture, and it emerges as the key abiding concern of sculptors: the art is a part of the visual arts that is especially 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 item in its own right, with the same kind of independent existence in reality as a human body or a chair. A sculpture that is in relief does not exist in this independance. It is attached to and projects from or is an integral part of some other object that can serve either as a background for it or a matrix from whence it emerges.

The actual 3-D nature of sculpture in the round restricts its scope in certain respects when compared with the scope of painting. Sculpture will not cast the illusion of space by simple optical means, or invest its structure with atmosphere and light as we might see in painting. However, sculpture does possess a reality, a vivid physical presence that is denied in the pictorial arts. Different sculptures can be tangible as well as visible, and they can appeal strongly and directly to our tactile and visual sensibilities. Even the visually impaired, even those who are congenitally blind, can produce 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 roots of sculptural forms can be based in the pleasure we experience in fondling things.

All three-dimensional forms are considered as having an expressive character along with their purely geometric properties. They come across to the observer as delicate, aggressive, flowing, taut, relaxed, dynamic, soft, and so on. By exploiting the evocative qualities of form, the artist is able to create imagery in which subject matter and expressiveness of form are mutually reinforcing. This visual imagery will go beyond the pure presentation of fact and create a huge range of subtle and powerful feelings.

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

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

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