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Paper originated in China in about AD 105. It reached Central Asia by 751 and Baghdad by 793, and then by the 14th century there were paper mills in a number of places in Europe. The invention of the printing press in about 1450 markedly increased the need for paper, and at the beginning of the 19th century wood and other vegetable pulps began to replace rags as the foremost source of fibre for papermaking.

Before 1798, Nicholas-Louis Robert invented the first paper-making machine. With a moving screen belt, it was made one sheet at a time by dipping a frame or mould with a screen bottom into a vat of pulp. Some years later the brothers Henry and Sealy Fourdrinier improved Robert’s machine, and in 1809 John Dickinson invented the first cylinder machine.

Although most steps in papermaking have become highly mechanized, the basic process has remained mostly unchanged. First of all, the fibres are separated and wetted to create the paper pulp, or stock. The pulp is then filtered on a woven screen that forms a sheet of fibre, which is then pressed and compacted to squeeze out most of the water. The remaining water is removed by evaporation, and the dry sheet is further compressed and, depending upon the intended use, coated or impregnated with other substances.

Differences among the grades and types of paper are determined by a number of factors: the type of fibre being used; the preparation of the pulp, which is either by mechanical (groundwood) or chemical (primarily sulfite, soda, or sulfate) methods, or by a combination of the two; by the addition of more materials to the pulp, the most commonly used being bleach or colouring and sizing, the latter to retard penetration by ink; by conditions under which the sheet is formed, including its weight; and by the physical or chemical treatment applied to the resulting sheet.

Although wood has become the foremost source of fibre for papermaking, rag fibres are still used for paper of the greatest strength, resistance to mould, and permanence. Recycled wastepaper (including newsprint) and cardboard are also important sources. Other fibres used include straw, bagasse (residue from crushed sugarcane), esparto, bamboo, flax, hemp, jute, and kenaf. Some paper, in particular specialty items, is made using synthetic fibres.

Weight or substance per unit area, called basis weight, is measured in reams (now commonly 500 sheets). Paper is also measured by caliper (thickness) and density. The strength and durability of paper is determined by factors such as the strength and length of the fibres, as well as their bonding ability, and the formation and structure of the sheet. The visible properties of paper include its brightness, colour, opacity, and gloss. Among the most important paper grades are bond, book, bristol, groundwood and newsprint, kraft, paperboard, and sanitary.

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Before you can create the best artworks that capture your unique painting style, you will need to secure four essential art supplies that can help you express your deepest feelings onto the canvas. Once you have obtained these important tools, you are ready to explore the world of art without any inhibitions or reservations. Here is a list of the necessary supplies that can inspire you to create your very own masterpiece.

Paintbrushes
Every painter needs a brush to convey a message to his or her audience. Start finding different types of brushes that can help you while you are exploring various painting techniques. Start with a flat synthetic brush to create simple works of art. As your skills continue to improve, search for other art supplies such as flat bristle brushes, Filbert brushes, and sable brushes (and think outside of the box, trying items such as rubber wedges, potato/lino cut shapes}. All of these tools can add a mix to every idea you were able to put into paintings.

Palettes and palette knives
While you are using oil-based paint, you will need to use a wood palette to hold them. Do not forget to clean your palette at the end of all your painting sessions. If you need to use acrylic paints, use a paper palette or any plastic surface instead of a wooden palette.

You can use palette knives to mix the paint on your wooden or paper palette. Try to find trowel-shaped palette knives that you can use to remove the paint from your canvas or palette.

Oil paint and special mediums
Oil paint is one of the most common art supplies used for painting pictures with beautiful textures. Their versatile nature can help you use thin and thick textures for your paintings. Since they tend to dry slowly, you will have plenty of time to work the oil paint on the canvas and to scrape some of the paint off for revisions.

You will also need special mediums to thin the oil paint every time it becomes too thick. You can also use it for cleaning your brushes and using special techniques such as glazing.

Artist’s canvas
When purchasing canvases, you usually have the option to purchase a stretched canvas or a canvas board. Stretched canvases are conveniently mounted on stretcher bars, that can be displayed on walls even when they are not framed.

If you have a limited budget, use canvas boards as an alternative to high-end stretched canvases. Although they are cheaper than stretched canvases, they can deliver superior performance with their durable card panels and versatile surfaces.

With these four key art supplies, you can share the beautiful images you have visualised by preserving them into an exceptional work of art.

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Abstract Art is a modern movement in American painting that started during the late 40s and was a dominating trend in Western painting in the 50s. The leading American Abstract Expressionist painters were Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko. Contemporaries included Clyfford Still, Philip Guston, Helen Frankenthaler, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, Lee Krasner, Bradley Walker Tomlin, William Baziotes, Ad Reinhardt, Richard Pousette-Dart, Elaine de Kooning, and Jack Tworkov. Most of them worked, lived, or had galleries in New York City.

Though it is the general designation, Abstract Expressionism is not an apt title of the kind of art created by those artists. Actually, the movement consisted of many different painterly styles that changed in both technique and quality of work. Despite this variety, Abstract Expressionist paintings possess some general aspects. They are basically abstract — in effect, they depict forms not taken from the outer world.

They furthermore display free, spontaneous, and individualised emotional expression, and they exhibit vast freedom of technical skill and process to achieve this goal, with a particular emphasis put on the manipulation of the variable physical characteristic of paint to create expressive qualities (e.g., sensuousness, dynamism, violence, mystery, lyricism). They put likewise importance on the unstudied and intuitive application of the paint in a type of psychological improvisation akin to the automatism of the Surrealists, with the similar intent of demonstrating the strength of the creative subconcious in art. They exhibit the conscious abandonment of regularly structured composition found by use of discrete and segregable effects and their replacement with a sole unified, unchanged partition, network, or other image that exists in unstructured space. Last, the paintings fill big canvases to grant those aforementioned visual aspects both monumentality and engrossing power.

The early Abstract Expressionists had two notable forerunners: Arshile Gorky, who painted esoteric biomorphic forms using a free, delicately linear and liquid paint application; and Hans Hofmann, who made use of dynamic and harshly textured brushwork in his abstract but conventionally composed pieces. An early special influence on nascent Abstract Expressionism was the arrival on the US shores in the late 30s and early 40s of a host of Surrealists and other important European avant-garde artists fleeing the rise of the Nazis in Europe. The avant-garde artists quickly impressed the native New York City painters and granted them a more intimate insight of the vanguard of European art. The Abstract Expressionist movement itself is generally seen as having been initiated with the paintings done by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning during the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Keeping in mind the variation of techniques of the Abstract Expressionist movement, three general approaches can be located. First was action painting which is recognised by a loose, quickfire, dynamic, or powerful handling of paint in sweeping or slashing brushstrokes, and in applications in part dictated by chance, i.e. dripping or spilling paint openly onto the canvas. Pollock first practiced action painting by dripping commercial paints on raw canvas to build up complex and tangled skeins of paint into thrilling and suggestive linear patterns. De Kooning had extremely vigorous and expressive brushstrokes to build richly coloured and textured images. Kline utilised dynamic, sweeping black strokes on white canvas to create starkly monumental forms.

The middle field of Abstract Expressionism is exhibited by several varied styles going from the lyrical, delicate imagery and fluid shapes in paintings by Guston and Frankenthaler to the clearly structured, forceful, almost calligraphic art of Motherwell and Gottlieb.

The final and least emotionally expressive ground was that of Rothko, Newman, and Reinhardt. These painters had large areas or fields of flat colour and weak diaphanous paint to create quiet, subtle, almost meditative outcomes. The top colour-field painter was Rothko; most of his works consist of wide combinations of soft-edged, solidly coloured rectangular fields that tend to shimmer and resonate.

Abstract Expressionism made a particular influence on both the American and European art circles through the fifties. Indeed, the movement sparked the change of the creative centre of modern day painting from Paris to New York City in the postwar era. During the course of the 50s, the the movement’s younger participants increasingly came to the leadership of the colour-field painters. By the sixties, those young practitioners had largely shifted away from the grand expressiveness of the action painters.

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