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What is Water Colour?

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Water colour is a form of colour pigment ground in gum, usually gum arabic, and applied with brush and water to a painting surface, usually paper; the term also denotes 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 blended with casein, a phosphoprotein of milk.

Watercolour can compete 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 adding in he leaves out. The paper itself creates the whites. The darkest accents are painted 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 diluted with water. The more water in the wash, the more the paper affects 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 rough surface of the paper—creates various granular effects similar to those of crayon sketch. Whole compositions can be created in this way. This technique also may be used over dull washes to enliven them.

Three hundred years before the golden age of late 18th-century English watercolourists, Albrecht Dürer had predicted their approach to 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 preparatory sketches for oil paintings.

The primary 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 utilized rags, sponges, and knives to create stunning effects 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 eventually 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 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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Oil Paints and Painting

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Artists’ oil colours are put together by stirring dry powder pigments with selected refined linseed oil until the mixture reaches a stiff paste thickness then grinding it under harsh friction in steel roller mills. The smoothness of the colour is essential. The common feel is a smooth, buttery paste, as opposed to stringy or long or tacky. When a transient or mobile element is needed by the artist, a liquid painting medium such as pure gum turpentine must be added with the concoction. To speed up drying, a siccative, or liquid drier, should be commonly used.

Top-class brushes are manufactured in two styles: red sable (hair from different members of the weasel family) and whitened hog bristles. They both are manufactured in in numbered sizes for four regular shapes: round (pointed), flat, bright (flat but is shorter and less supple), and oval (flat but bluntly pointed). Red sable brushes are generally chosen for the smoother, more delicate type of brushstroke. The painting knife, a declicately tempered, thin version of an artist’s palette knife, is a useful method for painting oil colours in a robust way.

The common support for an oil painting is a canvas made of pure European linen of strong close weave. A canvas is cut to the necessary size and pulled over a frame, often a wood frame, to which it is then secured by tacks or, during the 20th century, by use of staples. To lessen the absorbency of the fabric and to create a consistent surface, a primer or ground may be applied and left to dry before painting begins. The most generally used 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, has to be utilised. A number of other supports, for example paper and differing textiles and metals, also have been tried.

A layer of paint varnish is often put on to a completed oil painting to protect it from atmospheric attacks, minor abrasions, or an injurious accumulation of dirt. This film of varnish paint could be removed safely by experts who use isopropyl alcohol and such common solvents. The varnish also sets the surface to a uniform lustre and takes the depth of tone and colour intensity really to the vibrancy first created by the artist in the wet paint. Some painters, in particular those who do not favour deep, intense colouring, will stay with a mat, or lustreless, finish in their oil paintings.

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

Oil as a medium of painting is dated as early as the 11th century. The technique of easel painting with oil colours, however, came directly from 15th-century tempera-painting styles. Essential improvements in how to refine linseed oil and the availability of volatile solvents after 1400 coincided with a need for some other medium than pure egg-yolk tempera, to meet the changing requirements of the Renaissance (see tempera painting). Initially, oil paints and varnishes had been used to glaze tempera panels that were painted with a common linear draftsmanship. The technically gleaming, gem-like paintings by the 15th-century Flemish painter Jan van Eyck, for example, were completed in this new style.

Throughout the 16th century, oils became firmly established as the fundamental painting material in Venice. At the end of the century, Venetian painters had grown proficient in utilising the fundamental traits of oil painting, particularly in their use of many layers of glaze. Canvas of linen, after a long period of growth, overcame wood panels as the most commonly used support.

One 17th-century master of the oil technique was Velázquez, a Spanish artist in the Venetian tradition, whose remarkably economical but sure brushstrokes have commonly been repeated, particularly in portraiture. The Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens influenced later painters in the method in which he loaded light colours opaquely, juxtaposing his thin, transparent darks and shadows. Another notable 17th-century master of oil painting was the Dutch painter Rembrandt. In his artworks, a single brushstroke can effectively depict form; cumulative strokes create great textural depth, by combining the rough and the smooth, the thick and the thin. A field of loaded whites and transparent darks is then enhanced by glaze, blendings, and highly controlled impastos.

Other notable influences on the techniques of later easel painting are the smooth, thinly painted, deliberately planned, tight qualities. A great many admired works (e.g., like those of Johannes Vermeer) were executed with smooth gradations and blends of tones 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, and some abstract painters – including to some extent contemporary painters who use traditional styles – have shown a need for an entirely different plastic flow or viscosity that cannot be formed with oil paint and its conventional additives. Some desire a greater variation of thick and/or thin applications and a quicker rate of drying. Some artists mix coarsely grained substances with colours to create new textures, some of them have used oil paints in greater volume than traditionally, and a large part have started to use acrylic paints, which are more versatile and dry speedily.

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What is Sculpture?

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Sculpture is an art in which hard or plastic materials are shaped into 3-D works of art. 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 massive variety of material can 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 simply shaped and combined.

Sculpture is not a fixed label that applies to a permanently standing category of objects or range of activities. It is, rather, an art that is growing and is changing and is continually extending the range of activities and evolving new types of objects. The scope of the term was much wider in the later half of the 20th century than it had been only two or three decades before, and in the fluid state of the visual arts at the beginning of the 21st century, nobody can predict what its future possibilities are likely to be.

Certain features which in previous centuries were considered to be essential to the art of sculpture but are now not present in a majority of modern sculpture and can no longer form part of a definition. One of the most important of these is representation. Previous to the 20th century, sculpture was considered to be a representational art; imitating forms in life, that were mostly human figures but also inanimate objects, such as game, utensils, and books. At the dawn of the 20th century, however, sculpture has also included nonrepresentational forms. It became accepted that forms of such functional three-dimensional objects as furniture, pots, and buildings can be expressive and beautiful without being representational. It was only in the 20th century that nonfunctional, nonrepresentational, three-D works of art began to be common practice.

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 within and between its solid parts — have usually been to some degree an inextricable part of its design, but their role was purely secondary. In a large part of modern sculpture, however, the focus has broadened, and the spatial roles have started to be dominant. Spatial sculpture is now a fully recognisable area of the art of sculpture.

It was also taken for granted in sculpture from the past that its components consisted of a constant shape and size and, except for works such as Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Diana (a monumental weather vane), could not move. With the recent development of kinetic sculpture, neither the immobility nor immutability of its form can remain to be viewed as fundamental to the art.

Additionally, sculpture in the 20th century was not confined to the two traditional forming methods of carving and modeling, or to any traditional natural materials like stone, metal, wood, ivory, bone, and clay. Because today’s sculptors will use any materials and methods of manufacture that they decide to use, the art of sculpture can no longer be identified for the use of any special materials or techniques.

During all these changes, there is probably only one area that has remained constant in the art of sculpture, and it emerges as the key abiding concern of sculptors: the art form is a branch of the visual arts that is particularly concerned with the creation of works in three dimensions.

Sculpture should be either in the round or in relief. A sculpture in the round will be a separate, detached piece in its own right, with an independent existence in the world as a human body or a chair. A relief does not exist in this independant form. It is attached to and projects from or is an innate part of some object that may serve either as a background against which it is set or a matrix from which it projects.

The actual 3D nature of sculpture in the round restricts its scope in some respects when compared with the scope of painting. Sculpture does not have the illusion of space from simple optical means, or invest its structure with atmosphere and light as we might see in painting. Sculpture does possess a realistic experience, a vivid physical presence that is simply denied in the pictorial arts. Different sculptures are tangible as well as visible, and appeal strongly and directly to our tactile and visual senses. Even the visually impaired, and those who are congenitally blind, can construct and appreciate certain types of sculpture. It was, in fact, said by the 20th-century art critic Sir Herbert Read that sculpture should be considered as firstly an art of touch and that the beginnings of sculptural art can be based on the pleasure we experience in touch.

All three-D forms are considered as possessing an expressive character along with purely geometric properties. They strike the observer as delicate, aggressive, flowing, taut, relaxed, dynamic, soft, and so forth. By exploiting the evocative qualities of form, artists are able to create visual images in which subject matter and expressiveness of form are mutually reinforcing. Such images go beyond the simple presentation of fact and impress a wide range of subtle and powerful emotions.

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

All human beings, intimately involved from birth with the world of 3D form, understand something of its structural and expressive aspects and possess emotional responses to them. This combination of intellectual understanding and sensitive reaction, also known as a sense of form, can be cultivated and refined. It is to the sense of form that this art primarily appeals.

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