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  • What is Water Colour?

    Posted on May 8, 2011 by Rusty Nails

    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 normally transparent but can be made 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 compares in range and variety 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. 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 made his preferred result. The whites are created with an 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 placed on the paper with the pigment as it comes out of the tube or with a small amount of water mixed with it. Otherwise the colours are thinned with water. The greater amount of water in the wash, the more the paper influences 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 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 sketch. Whole compositions can be produced in this way. This technique may also be brushed over dull washes to enliven them.

    Three hundred years before the late 18th-century English watercolourists, Albrecht Dürer had anticipated their technique of transparent colour washes in a remarkable 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 used rags, sponges, and knives to craft stunning impressions of light and texture. Victorian artists, such as Birket Foster, used a time consuming technique 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 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 pigment 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 bare paper create the sparkle characteristic of pure watercolour. Tonal gradations and soft, atmospheric qualities are formed by staining the paper when it is very wet with differing 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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  • Oil Paints and Painting

    Posted on October 26, 2010 by Rusty Nails

    Artists’ oil colours are put together by mixing dry powder pigments with special refined linseed oil until the substance reaches a stiff paste thickness and then grinding it with strong friction in steel roller mills. The smoothness of the hue is essential. The standard is a smooth, buttery paste, rather than stringy or long or tacky. When a flowing or mobile style is required by the artist, a liquid painting medium such as pure gum turpentine must be combined with the mixture. If the artist wants to accelerate drying, a siccative, or liquid drier, might be generally used.

    Top-class brushes are made in two styles: red sable (with hair from various members of weasel) and chemically whitened hog bristles. They are produced in in numbered sizes for four regular shapes: round (pointed), flat, bright (flat shape but is shorter and less supple), and oval (flat but is bluntly pointed). Red sable brushes are usually utilised for smoother, delicate kind of technique. The painting knife, a declicately tempered, skinny version of an palette knife, is a common tool for applying oil colours in a robust style.

    The usual support for oil painting is a canvas of pure European linen of sturdy close weave. This canvas is cut to the desired size and pulled over a frame, commonly a wooden one, and then secured by tacks or, during the 20th century, by use of staples. To lower the absorbency of the fabric itself and to create a glossy surface, a primer or ground is applied and given time to dry before painting. The most typically seen primers for this are gesso, rabbit-skin glue, and lead white. If density and a consistent texture are preferred rather than springiness and texture, a wooden or processed paperboard panel, sized or primed, should be utilised. Lots of other supports, for example paper and varying textiles and metals, also have been tried.

    A finish of varnish is usually given to a finished oil painting to protect it from atmospheric attacks, minor abrasions, or an injurious accumulation of dirt. This film of varnish paint might be removed without damaging the painting by experts with use of isopropyl alcohol and other such ordinary solvents. The film varnish also brings the surface to a consistent lustre and brings the depth of tone and colour intensity essentially to the vibrancy initially created by the artist in the wet paint. Some contemporary painters, in particular those who don’t favour deep, intense colouring, and prefer a mat, or lustreless, finish in their paintings.

    The majority of oil paintings created previous to the 19th century were built in layers. The first would be a blank, uniform field of thinned paint called a ground. The ground graduated the gleam of the primer and provided a base of gentle colour on which to apply oil paint. The shapes and items in the painting were then roughly blocked in with shades of white, along with gray or neutral green, red, or brown. The eventuating field of monochromatic colours were known as the underpainting. Forms would be further defined using either the paint or scumbles, which are irregular, thinly applied layers of opaque pigment that can create a variety of effects. At the final point, transparent layers of pure colour known as glazes would then be utilised to impart luminosity, depth, and brilliance to the objects, and highlights could be imparted with thick, textured patches of paint called impastos.

    Oil as a painting medium is dated circa the 11th century. The technique of easel painting with oil colours, however, resulted directly from 15th-century tempera-painting styles. Simple 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, meeting the changing needs of the Renaissance (see tempera painting). At first, oil paints and varnishes were used to glaze tempera panels that had been painted with a common linear draftsmanship. The technically vibrant, jewel-like paintings of the 15th-century Flemish artist Jan van Eyck, for example, were finished in this new way.

    In the 16th century, oil paint became firmly established as the fundamental painting material in Venice. By the 17th century, Venetian artists had grown proficient in utilising the essential characteristics of oil painting, particularly in their use of a number of layers of glaze. Canvas of linen, after a long time of growth, topped wood panelling as the common support.

    A 17th-century master of the oil technique was Velázquez, a Spanish painter in the Venetian tradition, whose remarkably economical but sure brushstrokes have commonly been adopted, especially in portraiture. The Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens influenced later painters in the style in which he loaded light colours opaquely, juxtaposing the thin, transparent darks and shadows. The third great 17th-century master of oil painting was the Dutch painter Rembrandt. In his art, a single brushstroke could effectively depict form; cumulative strokes gave great textural depth, by combining the rough and the smooth, the thick and the thin. A technique of loaded whites and transparent darks would be further enhanced by glazing, blendings, and highly controlled impastos.

    Other basic influences on the techniques of easel painting are the smooth, thinly painted, deliberately planned, tight styles of painting. A great many admired works (e.g., from Johannes Vermeer) were created with smooth blends of colours to achieve subtle forms and delicate colour variations.

    The technical requirements of some schools of modern painting cannot be realized with traditional genres and techniques, however. Some abstract painters – and some modern traditional painters – have shown a desire for a plastic flow or viscosity that cannot be had with oil paint and its conventional additives. Some want a greater variation of thick or thin applications and a expedient rate of drying. Some artists mixed coarsely grained materials with their colours to create texture, some artists applied oil paints in much heavier thickness than is usual, and many have turned to using acrylic paints, because they are more versatile and dry quickly.

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  • What is Sculpture?

    Posted on October 12, 2010 by Rusty Nails

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

    Sculpture is not a fixed name that applies to a permanently restricted category of objects or sets of activities. It is, rather, the name given to art that grows and changes and continually extends the range of its activities and evolving new styles of objects. The definition of the term grew much wider in the second part of the 20th century than as it had been merely two or three decades before, and in the fluid state of visual art at the beginning of the 21st century, it is impossible to predict what its future extensions are going to see.

    Certain features which in previous centuries were considered to be essential to sculpture but are now not present in a majority of modern sculpture and thus no longer form part of the definition. One of the most significant of these is representation. Before the 20th century, sculpture was seen as a representational art; one that imitated forms in life, mostly human figures but also inanimate objects, such as game, utensils, and books. At the dawn of the 20th century, however, sculpture also included nonrepresentational forms. It became accepted that figures of such functional 3D objects as furniture, pots, and buildings could be expressive and beautiful without having to be in any way representational. It was only during the 20th century that nonfunctional, nonrepresentational, three-D art began to be created.

    Previous to the 20th century, sculpture was regarded as essentially an art of solid form, or mass. Whilte the negative elements of sculpture — the voids and hollows underneath and between its solid parts — have always been to some degree an integral part of its design, but that role was secondary. In a great deal of modern sculpture, however, the focus of attention has shifted, and the spatial roles have come out as dominant. Spatial sculpture is now a commonly acceptable field of the art of sculpture.

    It was also taken for granted in the past ideas of sculpture that its components were of a constant shape and size and, except for pieces such as Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Diana (a monumental weather vane), should not move. With the contemporary development of kinetic sculpture, neither the immobility nor immutability of its elements can remain to be viewed as essential to the art of sculpture.

    Additionally, sculpture during the 20th century was no longer restricted to the two traditional forming procedures of carving and modeling, or to such traditional natural materials as stone, metal, wood, ivory, bone, and clay. Now that today’s sculptors might use any materials and methods of manufacture that work for their purpose, the definition of the art form can no longer be identified for the use of any special materials or techniques.

    Throughout all these changes, there is probably only one thing that has remained constant in the art form, and it exists as the key abiding concern of sculptors: the art of sculpture is a field of the visual arts that is particularly concerned with the creation of items in 3-D.

    Sculpture might be either in the round or in relief. A sculpture in the round will be a separate, detached piece in its own right, with a similar independent existence in reality as a human body or a chair. A sculpture in relief does not have this independant form. It is attached to and projects from or is an innate part of something else that can serve either as a background against which it is set or a matrix from whence it emerges.

    The actual 3-D nature of sculpture in the round restricts its scope in certain respects in comparison with the scope of painting. Sculpture does not conjure the illusion of space from simple optical means, or invest its shape with atmosphere and light as we can see in a painting. However, it does proffer a reality, a vivid physical presence that is denied in the pictorial arts. Sculpture can be tangible as well as visible, and appeal strongly and directly to the tactile and visual senses. Even the visually impaired, and those who are congenitally blind, can produce and appreciate certain forms of sculpture. It was, in fact, stated by the 20th-century art critic Sir Herbert Read that sculpture should be seen as primarily an art of touch and that the origins of sculptural art can be traced to the pleasure one experiences in fondling things.

    All three-dimensional forms are considered as possessing an expressive character along with purely geometric properties. They are viewed the observer as delicate, aggressive, flowing, taut, relaxed, dynamic, soft, and so on. By exploiting the emotive qualities of form, sculptors are able to create visual imagery in which subject matter and expressiveness mutually reinforce the form. Visual imagery will go beyond the simple presentation of fact and imply a vast range of subtle and powerful emotions.

    The aesthetic raw material used for this art is, so to speak, the total realm of expressive three-dimensional form. A sculpture can draw upon what already exists in the endless variety of natural and man-made form, or it can be an art of simple invention. It has been used to express a wide range of human emotions and feelings from the subtly tender and delicate to the highly violent and ecstatic.

    All human beings, innately involved from birth with the world of three-dimensional form, know something of its structural and expressive aspects and will possess emotional reactions to them. This combination of understanding and reaction, often called a sense of form, is able to be cultivated and refined. It is to the sense of form that sculpture primarily appeals.

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