The following is an alphabetical list of techniques used in Painting. The list comprises devices used to introduce the illusion of three dimensions on a two-dimensional surface, methods of paint application, and different mediums chosen by the artist to create the desired visual effect.

1. 40 PAINTING TECHNIQUES
OF FINE ART
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2. Introduction
The following is an alphabetical list of techniques used
in Painting. The list comprises devices used to
introduce the illusion of three dimensions on a two-
dimensional surface, methods of paint application,
and different mediums chosen by the artist to create
the desired visual effect.

3. What is Painting?
Painting, the expression of ideas and emotions, with the creation of
certain aesthetic qualities, in a two-dimensional visual language.
The elements of this language—its shapes, lines, colours, tones, and
textures—are used in various ways to produce sensations of volume,
space, movement, and light on a flat surface. These elements are
combined into expressive patterns in order to represent real or
supernatural phenomena, to interpret a narrative theme, or to
create wholly abstract visual relationships. An artist’s decision to
use a particular medium, such
as tempera, fresco, oil, acrylic, watercolour or other water-based
paints, ink, gouache, encaustic, or casein, as well as the choice of a
particular form, such as mural, easel, panel, miniature, manuscript
illumination, scroll, screen or fan, panorama, or any of a variety of
modern forms, is based on the sensuous qualities and the expressive
possibilities and limitations of those options. The choices of the
medium and the form, as well as the artist’s own technique,
combine to realize a unique visual image.

4. Earlier cultural traditions—of tribes, religions, guilds, royal
courts, and states—largely controlled the craft, form,
imagery, and subject matter of painting and determined
its function, whether ritualistic, devotional, decorative,
entertaining, or educational. Painters were employed
more as skilled artisans than as creative artists. Later the
notion of the “fine artist” developed in Asia and
Renaissance Europe. Prominent painters were afforded
the social status of scholars and courtiers; they signed
their work, decided its design and often its subject and
imagery, and established a more personal—if not always
amicable—relationship with their patrons.

5. During the 19th century painters in Western societies began to lose
their social position and secure patronage. Some artists countered
the decline in patronage support by holding their own exhibitions
and charging an entrance fee. Others earned an income through
touring exhibitions of their work. The need to appeal to a
marketplace had replaced the similar (if less impersonal) demands
of patronage, and its effect on the art itself was probably similar as
well. Generally, artists can now reach an audience only through
commercial galleries and public museums, although their work may
be occasionally reproduced in art periodicals. They may also be
assisted by financial awards or commissions from industry and the
state. They have, however, gained the freedom to invent their own
visual language and to experiment with new forms and
unconventional materials and techniques. For example, some
painters have combined other media, such as sculpture, with
painting to produce three-dimensional abstract designs.

6. Other artists have attached real objects to
the canvas in collage fashion or used electricity to
operate coloured kinetic panels and
boxes. Conceptualartists frequently express their ideas in
the form of a proposal for an unrealizable project, while
performance artists are an integral part of their
own compositions. The restless endeavour to extend the
boundaries of expression in Western art produces
continuous international stylistic changes. The often
bewildering succession of new movements in painting is
further stimulated by the swift interchange of ideas by
means of international art journals, traveling exhibitions,
and art centres.

7. What is Acrylic Painting?
Acrylic painting, painting executed in the medium
of synthetic acrylic resins. Acrylics dry rapidly, serve as a vehicle for
any kind of pigment, and are capable of giving both the transparent
brilliance of watercolour and the density of oil paint. They are
considered to be less affected by heat and other destructive forces
than is oil paint. They found favour among artists who were
concerned about the health risks posed by the handling of oil paints
and the inhalation of fumes associated with them. Because of all
these desirable characteristics, acrylic paints became immediately
popular with artists when they were first commercially promoted in
the 1960s. Notable 20th-century artists who used acrylic paint
include Pop artists Andy Warhol and Roy
Lichtenstein, Op artist Bridget Riley, colour field artists Mark
Rothko, Ellsworth Kelly, and Barnett Newman, and British
artist David Hockney.

8. What is Action Painting?
Action painting, direct, instinctual, and highly dynamic kind
of art that involves the spontaneous application of vigorous,
sweeping brushstrokes and the chance effects of dripping and
spilling paint onto the canvas. The term was coined by the
American art critic Harold Rosenberg to characterize the work
of a group of American Abstract Expressionists who utilized
the method from about 1950. Action painting is distinguished
from the carefully preconceived work of the “abstract
imagists” and “colour-field” painters, which constitutes the
other major direction implicit in Abstract Expressionismand
resembles Action painting only in its absolute devotion to
unfettered personal expression free of all
traditional aesthetic and social values.

9. The works of the Action painters Jackson Pollock, Willem
de Kooning, Franz Kline, Bradley Walker Tomlin,
and Jack Tworkov reflect the influence of the “automatic”
techniques developed in Europe in the 1920s and ’30s by
the Surrealists. While Surrealist automatism, which
consisted of scribblings recorded without the artist’s
conscious control, was primarily designed to awaken
unconscious associations in the viewer, the automatic
approach of the Action painters was primarily conceived
as a means of giving the artist’s instinctive creative forces
free play and of revealing these forces directly to the
viewer. In Action painting the act of painting itself, being
the moment of the artist’s creative interaction with his
materials, was as significant as the finished work.

10. It is generally recognized that Jackson Pollock’s abstract
drip paintings, executed from 1947, opened the way to
the bolder, gestural techniques that characterize Action
painting. The vigorous brushstrokes of de Kooning’s
“Woman” series, begun in the early 1950s, successfully
evolved a richly emotive expressive style. Action painting
was of major importance throughout the 1950s in
Abstract Expressionism, the most-influential art
movement at the time in the United States. By the end of
the decade, however, leadership of the movement had
shifted to the colour-field and abstract imagist painters,
whose followers in the 1960s rebelled against the
irrationality of the Action painters. See alsoTachism.

11. What is Aerial Perspective?
Aerial perspective, also called atmospheric perspective, method of
creating the illusion of depth, or recession, in a painting or drawing by
modulating colour to simulate changes effected by the atmosphere on the
colours of things seen at a distance. Although the use of
aerial perspective has been known since antiquity, Leonardo da Vinci first
used the term aerial perspective in his Treatise on Painting, in which he
wrote: “Colours become weaker in proportion to their distance from the
person who is looking at them.” It was later discovered that the presence in
the atmosphere of moisture and of tiny particles of dust and similar
material causes a scattering of light as it passes through them, the degree of
scattering being dependent on the wavelength, which corresponds to the
colour, of the light. Because light of short wavelength—blue light—is
scattered most, the colours of all distant dark objects tend toward blue; for
example, distant mountains have a bluish cast. Light of long wavelength—
red light—is scattered least; thus, distant bright objects appear redder
because some of the blue is scattered and lost from the light by which they
are seen.

12. The intervening atmosphere between a viewer and, for
example, distant mountains, creates other visual effects
that can be mimicked by landscape painters. The
atmosphere causes distant forms to have less distinct
edges and outlines than forms near the viewer, and
interior detail is similarly softened or blurred. Distant
objects appear somewhat lighter than objects of similar
tone lying closer at hand, and in general contrasts
between light and shade appear less extreme at great
distances. All these effects are more apparent at the base
of a mountain than at its peak, since the density of the
intervening atmosphere is greater at lower elevations.

13. Examples of aerial perspective have been found in ancient
Greco-Roman wall paintings. The techniques were lost
from European art during the “Dark” and Middle
Ages and were rediscovered by Flemish painters of the
15th century (such as Joachim Patinir), after which they
became a standard element in the European
painter’s technical vocabulary. The 19th-century British
landscape painter J.M.W. Turner made perhaps the
boldest and most ambitious use of aerial perspective
among Western artists. Aerial perspective was used with
great sophistication and pictorial effectiveness by
Chinese landscape painters from about the 8th century
on.

14. What is Anamorphosis?
Anamorphosis, in the visual arts, an
ingenious perspective technique that gives a distorted
image of the subject represented in a picture when seen
from the usual viewpoint but so executed that if viewed
from a particular angle, or reflected in a curved mirror,
the distortion disappears and the image in the picture
appears normal. Derived from the Greek word meaning
“to transform,” the term anamorphosis was first
employed in the 17th century, although this technique
had been one of the more curious by-products of the
discovery of perspective in the 14th and 15th centuries.

15. The first examples appear in Leonardo da
Vinci’s notebooks. It was regarded as a display of
technical virtuosity, and it was included in most
16th- and 17th-century drawing manuals. Two
important examples of anamorphosis are a portrait
of Edward VI (1546) that has been attributed to
William Scrots, and a skull in the foreground of Hans
Holbein the Younger’s painting of Jean de Dinteville
and Georges de Selve, The Ambassadors (1533).
Many examples are provided with special peepholes
through which can be seen the rectified view that
first eluded the viewer.

16. A modern equivalent of anamorphosis is the so-
called Ames Room, in which people and objects are
distorted by manipulation of the contours of the
room in which they are seen. This and other aspects
of anamorphosis received a good deal of attention in
the 20th century from psychologists interested
in perception.

17. Artists and architects in the 21st century continued to
experiment with anamorphic designs. In 2014 Swiss
artist Felice Varini—known for large-scale
anamorphic installations—created Three Ellipses for
Three Locks, for which he painted three ellipses,
segments of which covered roads, walls, and nearly
100 buildings in the historic centre of the city
of Hasselt, Belgium. The design
became coherent only when viewed from a particular
vantage point in the city.

18. What is Camaieu?
Camaieu, plural camaieux, painting technique by
which an image is executed either entirely in shades
or tints of a single colour or in several hues
unnatural to the object, figure, or scene represented.
When a picture is monochromatically rendered in
gray, it is called grisaille; when in yellow, cirage.
Originating in the ancient world, camaieu was used
in miniature painting to simulate cameos and in
architectural decoration to simulate relief sculpture.

19. What is Casein Painting?
Casein painting, painting executed with colours ground in a
solution of casein, a phosphoprotein of milk precipitated by heating
with an acid or by lactic acid in souring. In the form of homemade
curd made from soured skim milk, it has been a traditional adhesive
and binder for more than eight centuries. Refined, pure, powdered
casein, which can be dissolved with ammonia, has been used for
easel and mural paintings since the latter 19th and early 20th
centuries, and, more recently, ready-made casein paints in tubes
have come into very wide use. An advantage of casein painting is
that it can create effects that approach those of oil painting. It
permits the use of bristle brushes and a moderate impasto, like oil
painting, but not the fusion of tones. It is preferred by some because
of speedy drying and matte effects. When dry, the paint becomes
water resistant to a considerable degree. Casein paintings may be
varnished to further resemble oil paintings, and they are frequently
glazed or overpainted with oil colours. Because casein is too brittle
for canvas, it must be applied to rigid boards or panels.

20. What is Chiaroscuro?
Chiaroscuro, (from Italian: chiaro, “light,” and scuro,
“dark”) technique employed in the visual arts to
represent light and shadow as they define three-
dimensional objects.
Some evidence exists that ancient Greek and Roman artists
used chiaroscuro effects, but in European painting the
technique was first brought to its full potential
by Leonardo da Vinci in the late 15th century in such
paintings as his Adoration of the Magi (1481).
Thereafter, chiaroscuro became a primary technique for
many painters, and by the late 17th century the term was
routinely used to describe any painting, drawing,
or print that depended for its effect on an extensive
gradation of light and darkness.

21. In its most dramatic form—as in the works of those Italian
artists of the 17th century who came under the influence
of Caravaggio—it was known as tenebrismo, or tenebrism.
Caravaggio and his followers used a harsh, dramatic light to
isolate their figures and heighten their emotional tension.
Another outstanding master of chiaroscuro was Rembrandt,
who used it with remarkable psychological effect in his
paintings, drawings, and etchings. Peter Paul Rubens, Diego
Velázquez, and many other, lesser painters of
the Baroque period also used chiaroscuro to great effect. The
delicacy and lightness of 18th-century Rococo painting
represents a rejection of this dramatic use of chiaroscuro, but
the technique again became popular with artists of
the Romantic period, who relied upon it to create the emotive
effects they considered essential to their art.

22. In the graphic arts, the term chiaroscuro refers to a particular
technique for making a woodcut print in which effects of light
and shade are produced by printing each tone from a different
wood block. The technique was first used in woodcuts in Italy
in the 16th century, probably by the printmaker Ugo da Carpi.
To make a chiaroscuro woodcut, the key block was inked with
the darkest tone and printed first. Subsequent blocks were
inked with progressively lighter tones and carefully measured
to print in register with the key block. Chiaroscuro woodcuts
are printed in only one colour, brown, gray, green,
and sepia being preferred. The process attempted to
imitate wash and watercolour drawings and also became
popular as an inexpensive method of reproducing paintings.

23. What is Divisionism?
Divisionism, in painting, the practice of separating
colour into individual dots or strokes of pigment. It
formed the technical basis for Neo-Impressionism.
Following the rules of contemporary colour theory,
Neo-Impressionist artists such as Georges
Seurat and Paul Signac applied contrasting dots of
colour side by side so that, when seen from a
distance, these dots would blend and be perceived by
the retina as a luminous whole. Whereas the
term divisionism refers to this separation of colour
and its optical effects, the term pointillism refers
specifically to the technique of applying dots.

24. What is Easel Painting?
Easel painting, painting executed on a portable
support such as a panel or canvas, instead of on a
wall. It is likely that easel paintings were known to
the ancient Egyptians, and the 1st-century-
ADRoman scholar Pliny the Elder refers to a large
panel placed on an easel; it was not until the 13th
century, however, that easel paintings became
relatively common, finally superseding in popularity
the mural, or wall painting.

25. What is Encaustic Painting?
Encaustic painting, painting technique in which
pigments are mixed with hot liquid wax. Artists can
change the paint’s consistency by adding resin or oil
(the latter for use on canvas) to the wax. After the
paint has been applied to the support, which is
usually made of wood, plaster, or canvas, a heating
element is passed over the surface until the
individual brush or spatula marks fuse into a
uniform film. This “burning in” of the colours is an
essential element of the true encaustic technique.

26. Encaustic wax has many of the properties of oil paint: it
can give a very brilliant and attractive effect and offers
great scope for elegant and expressive brushwork. The
practical difficulties of using a medium that has to be
kept warm are considerable, though. Apart from the
greater sophistication of modern methods of heating, the
present-day technique is similar to that described by the
1st-century-CE Roman scholar Pliny the Elder. Encaustic
painting was invented by the ancient Greeks and was
brought to the peak of its technical perfection by
the genre painter Pausias in the 4th century BCE.

27. What is Foreshortening?
Foreshortening, method of rendering a specific object or
figure in a picture in depth.
The artist records, in varying degrees, the distortion that is seen
by the eye when an object or figure is viewed at a distance or
at an unusual angle. In a photograph of a recumbent figure
positioned so that the feet are nearest the camera, for
instance, the feet will seem unnaturally large and those body
parts at a distance, such as the head, unnaturally small. The
artist may either record this effect exactly, producing a
startling illusion of reality that seems to violate the picture
plane (surface of the picture), or modify it, slightly reducing
the relative size of the nearer part of the object, so as to make
a less-aggressive assault on the viewer’s eye and to relate the
foreshortened object more harmoniously to the rest of the
picture.

28. Insofar as foreshortening is basically concerned with
the persuasive projection of a form in
an illusionistic way, it is a type of perspective, but the
term foreshortening is almost invariably used in
relation to a single object, or part of an object, rather
than to a scene or group of objects.

29. What is Fresco Painting?
Fresco painting, method of painting water-based
pigments on freshly applied plaster, usually on wall
surfaces. The colours, which are made by grinding
dry-powder pigments in pure water, dry and set with
the plaster to become a permanent part of the wall.
Fresco painting is ideal for making murals because it
lends itself to a monumental style, is durable, and
has a matte surface.

30. What is Gouache?
Gouache, painting technique in which a gum or
an opaque white pigment is added to watercolours to
produce opacity. In watercolour the tiny particles of
pigment become enmeshed in the fibre of the paper;
in gouache the colour lies on the surface of the paper,
forming a continuous layer, or coating. A gouache is
characterized by a directly reflecting brilliance.
When applied with bristle brushes it is possible to
achieve a slight but effective impasto (thick-coated)
quality; with sable brushes, a smooth, flawless colour
field is obtained.

31. A painting technique of great antiquity, gouache was
used by the Egyptians. It was a popular medium with
Rococo artists such as François Boucher (1703–70).
Contemporary painters use gouache alone or in
combination with watercolour and other mediums.

32. What is Graffiti?
Graffiti, form of visual communication, usually
illegal, involving the unauthorized marking of public
space by an individual or group. Although the
common image of graffiti is a stylistic symbol or
phrase spray-painted on a wall by a member of a
street gang, some graffiti is not gang-related. Graffiti
can be understood as antisocial behaviour performed
in order to gain attention or as a form of thrill
seeking, but it also can be understood as an
expressive art form.

33. Derived from the Italian word graffio (“scratch”), graffiti
(“incised inscriptions,” plural but often used as singular)
has a long history. For example, markings have been
found in ancient Roman ruins, in the remains of the
Mayan city of Tikal in Central America, on rocks in Spain
dating to the 16th century, and in medieval English
churches. During the 20th century, graffiti in the United
States and Europe was closely associated with gangs, who
used it for a variety of purposes: for identifying or
claiming territory, for memorializing dead gang members
in an informal “obituary,” for boasting about acts (e.g.,
crimes) committed by gang members, and for
challenging rival gangs as a prelude to violent
confrontations.

34. Graffiti was particularly prominent in major urban
centres throughout the world, especially in the
United States and Europe; common targets were
subways, billboards, and walls. In the 1990s there
emerged a new form of graffiti, known as “tagging,”
which entailed the repeated use of a single symbol or
series of symbols to mark territory. In order to
attract the most attention possible, this type of
graffiti usually appeared in strategically or centrally
located neighbourhoods.

35. To some observers graffiti is a form of public art,
continuing the tradition, for example, of
the muralscommissioned by the U.S. Works Progress
Administration Federal Art Project during the Great
Depression and the work of Diego Rivera in Mexico. Like
the murals of these artists, great works of graffiti can
beautify a neighbourhood and speak to the interests of a
specific community. For example, the graffiti in many
Hispanic neighbourhoods in the United States is quite
elaborate and is regarded by many as a form of urban art.
The question of whether such work is an innovative art
form or a public nuisance has aroused much debate.

36. Graffiti became notoriously prominent in New York
City in the late 20th century. Large elaborate
multicoloured graffiti created with spray paint on
building walls and subway cars came to define the
urban landscape. The art world’s fascination with
artists who functioned outside traditional gallery
channels stimulated an interest in this form of self-
expression. In the 1980s New York artists such
as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat gained
notoriety for their graffiti and parlayed this
recognition into successful careers as painters
represented by top galleries.

37. Most jurisdictions have laws prohibiting graffiti as
vandalism, and in some countries punishment is
quite severe. For example, in Singapore violators are
subject to caning. During the 1980s and ’90s many
jurisdictions sought ways to eliminate and remove
graffiti, fearing that it would otherwise lead to the
debasement of the community. Significant resources
were allocated for abatement and other clean-up
efforts, and some cities even
introduced mural programs or “free walls” to provide
legal opportunities for urban youths to express their
artistic creativity.

38. What is Grisaille?
Grisaille, painting technique by which an image is
executed entirely in shades of gray and usually severely
modeled to create the illusion of sculpture,
especially relief. This aspect of grisaille was used
particularly by the 15th-century Flemish painters (as in
the outer wings of the van Eycks’ Ghent Altarpiece) and
in the late 18th century to imitate classical sculpture in
wall and ceiling decoration. Among glass painters,
grisaille is the name of a gray, vitreous pigment used in
the art of colouring glass for stained glass. In
French, grisaille has also come to mean any painting
technique in which translucent oil colours are laid over a
monotone underpainting.

39. In the grisaille enamel painting technique, pulverized white
vitreous enamel is made into a paste by mixing it with water,
turpentine, oil of lavender, or petroleum oil and is then
applied to a dark enamel ground, usually coloured black or
blue. Lighter areas of the design are thickly painted, while the
gray areas are obtained by painting with thinner coats to allow
the dark background colour to tone the white enamel
pigment. This technique achieves a dramatic effect of light
and shade and a pronounced sense of three-dimensionality.
Grisaille enamels were developed in the 16th century in
France by the Limoges school of enamelers. Among the most
noted practitioners of this technique were members of
the Pénicaud family. The technique was also popular with
some 20th-century painters, including Alfred Leslie
and Chuck Close.

40. What is Impasto?
Impasto, paint that is applied to a canvas or panel in quantities that
make it stand out from the surface. Impasto was used frequently to
mimic the broken-textured quality of highlights—i.e., the surfaces of
objects that are struck by an intense light. Impasto came into its
own in the 17th century, when such Baroque painters as
Rembrandt, Frans Hals, and Diego Velázquez used skillfully and
minutely worked impastos to depict lined and wrinkled skin or the
sparkle of elaborately crafted armour, jewelry, and rich fabrics. The
19th-century painter Vincent van Gogh made notable use of
impastos, building up and defining the forms in his paintings with
thick, nervous dabs of paint. Twentieth-century painters such
as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning often applied impastos
with a dynamism and a gestural bravura that emphasized the
physical qualities of the paint itself. Since then, raw pigments
applied thickly to a canvas have become a staple technique of
modern abstract and semifigurative painting.

41. What is Miniature Painting?
Miniature painting, also called (16th–17th
century) limning, small, finely wrought portrait
executed on vellum, prepared card, copper, or ivory.
The name is derived from the minium, or red lead,
used by the medieval illuminators. Arising from a
fusion of the separate traditions of the illuminated
manuscriptand the medal,
miniature painting flourished from the beginning of
the 16th century down to the mid-19th century.

42. What is Mural?
Mural, a painting applied to and made integral with
the surface of a wall or ceiling. The term may
properly include painting on fired tiles but ordinarily
does not refer to mosaic decoration unless the
mosaic forms part of the overall scheme of the
painting.

43. What is Oil Painting?
Oil painting, painting in oil colours, a medium
consisting of pigments suspended in drying oils. The
outstanding facility with which fusion of tones or
colour is achieved makes it unique among fluid
painting mediums; at the same time, satisfactory
linear treatment and crisp effects are easily
obtained. Opaque, transparent, and translucent
painting all lie within its range, and it is unsurpassed
for textural variation.

44. What is Panel Painting?
Panel painting, painting executed on a rigid support—
ordinarily wood or metal—as distinct from painting done
on canvas. Before canvas came into general use at the
end of the 16th century, the panel was the support most
often used for easel painting. A variety of woods have
been used, including beech,
cedar, chestnut, fir, larch, linden,
white poplar, mahogany, olive, dark walnut, and teak.
Wooden panels were usually boiled or steamed to remove
gum and resin and thereby prevent splitting and then
were coated with size (a glutinous material) to fill pores
and with gesso (a mixture of glue and whiting), on which
the painting was executed. Metals used for panel
paintings include silver, tin, lead, and zinc.

45. During the Middle Ages, especially in Russia during
the period encompassing the work of the Novgorod
school (12th–16th century), paintings were executed
on panels over which leather had been stretched.
Panels were especially popular for making
decorative altarpieces. Siennese artist Duccio,
Flemish artists Robert Campin, Rogier van der
Weyden, and brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck, and
German artist Matthias Grünewald are notable for
their panel altarpieces.

46. What is Panorama?
Panorama, in the visual arts, continuous narrative
scene or landscape painted to conform to a flat or
curved background, which surrounds or is unrolled
before the viewer.

47. What is Perspective?
 Perspective, method of graphically depicting three-dimensional objects
and spatial relationships on a two-dimensional plane or on a plane that is
shallower than the original (for example, in flat relief).
 Perceptual methods of representing space and volume, which render them
as seen at a particular time and from a fixed position and are characteristic
of Chinese and most Western painting since the Renaissance, are in
contrast to conceptual methods. Pictures drawn by young children and
primitives (untrained artists), many paintings of cultures such as ancient
Egypt and Crete, India, Islam, and pre-Renaissance Europe, as well as the
paintings of many modern artists, depict objects and surroundings
independently of one another—as they are known to be, rather than as they
are seen to be—and from the directions that best present their most
characteristic features. Many Egyptian and Cretan paintings and drawings,
for example, show the head and legs of a figure in profile, while the eye and
torso are shown frontally (see photograph). This system produces not
the illusion of depth but the sense that objects and their surroundings have
been compressed within a shallow space behind the picture plane.

48. In Western art, illusions of perceptual volume and space
are generally created by use of the linear
perspectival system, based on the observations that
objects appear to the eye to shrink and parallel lines and
planes to converge to infinitely distant vanishing points
as they recede in space from the viewer. Parallel lines in
spatial recession will appear to converge on a single
vanishing point, called one-point perspective. Perceptual
space and volume may be simulated on the picture plane
by variations on this basic principle, differing according
to the number and location of the vanishing points.
Instead of one-point (or central) perspective, the artist
may use, for instance, angular (or oblique) perspective,
which employs two vanishing points.

49. Another kind of system—parallel perspective
combined with a viewpoint from above—is
traditional in Chinese painting. When buildings
rather than natural contours are painted and it is
necessary to show the parallel horizontal lines of the
construction, parallel lines are drawn parallel instead
of converging, as in linear perspective. Often foliage
is used to crop these lines before they extend far
enough to cause a building to appear warped.

50. The early European artist used a perspective that was an
individual interpretation of what he saw rather than a
fixed mechanical method. At the beginning of the
Italian Renaissance, early in the 15th century, the
mathematical laws of perspective were discovered by the
architect Filippo Brunelleschi, who worked out some of
the basic principles, including the concept of the
vanishing point, which had been known to the Greeks
and Romans but had been lost. These principles were
applied in painting by Masaccio (as in his Trinity fresco
in Santa Maria Novella, Florence; c. 1427), who within a
short period brought about an entirely new approach in
painting.

51. A style was soon developed using configurations of
architectural exteriors and interiors as the
background for religious paintings, which thereby
acquired the illusion of great spatial depth. In
his seminal Della pittura (1436; On Painting), Leon
Battista Alberti codified, especially for painters,
much of the practical work on the subject that had
been carried out by earlier artists; he formulated, for
example, the idea that “vision makes a triangle, and
from this it is clear that a very distant quantity seems
no larger than a point.”

52. Linear perspective dominated Western painting until
the end of the 19th century, when Paul
Cézanneflattened the conventional Renaissance
picture space. The Cubists and other 20th-century
painters abandoned the depiction of three-
dimensional space altogether and hence had no need
for linear perspective.

53. Linear perspective plays an important part in
presentations of ideas for works by architects,
engineers, landscape architects, and industrial
designers, furnishing an opportunity to view the
finished product before it is begun. Differing in
principle from linear perspective and used by both
Chinese and European painters, aerial perspective is
a method of creating the illusion of depth by a
modulation of colour and tone.

54. What is Plein-air Painting?
Plein-air painting, in its strictest sense, the practice
of painting landscape pictures out-of-doors; more
loosely, the achievement of an intense impression of
the open air (French: plein air) in a landscape
painting.

55. Until the time of the painters of the Barbizon school in
mid-19th-century France, it was normal practice to
execute rough sketches of landscape subjects in the open
air and produce finished paintings in the studio. Part of
this was a matter of convenience. Before the invention of
the collapsible tin paint tube, widely marketed by the
colour merchants Winsor & Newton in 1841, painters
purchased their colours in the form of
ground pigment and mixed them fresh with an
appropriate medium such as oil. The new tubes filled
with prepared colours, as well as the invention of a
lightweight, portable easel a decade later, made it much
easier to paint out-of-doors.

56. Despite these advances, many of the Barbizon painters
continued to create most of their work in the studio; not
until the late 1860s, with the work of Claude
Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Camille Pissarro, the
leaders of Impressionism, did painting en plein
air become more popular. This change came about from
1881, when Monet, in his efforts to capture the true
effects of light on the colour of landscape at any given
moment, began to carry several canvases at once into the
out-of-doors. On each he began a painting of the same
subject at a different time of day; on subsequent days, he
continued to work on each canvas in succession as the
appropriate light appeared.

57. What is Sand Painting?
Sand painting, also called dry painting, type of art
that exists in highly developed forms among the
Navajo and Pueblo Indians of the American
Southwest and in simpler forms among several
Plains and California Indian tribes.
Although sand painting is an art form, it is valued
among the Indians primarily for religious rather
than aesthetic reasons. Its main function is in
connection with healing ceremonies.

58. Sand paintings are stylized, symbolic pictures prepared by
trickling small quantities of crushed,
coloured sandstone, charcoal, pollen, or other dry
materials in white, blue, yellow, black, and red hues on a
background of clean, smoothed sand. About 600
different pictures are known, consisting of various
representations of deities, animals, lightning, rainbows,
plants, and other symbols described in the chants that
accompany various rites. In healing, the choice of the
particular painting is left to the curer. Upon completion
of the picture, the patient sits on the centre of the
painting, and sand from the painting is applied to parts
of his body. When the ritual is completed, the painting is
destroyed.

59. For years the Indians would not allow permanent,
exact copies of sand paintings to be made. When the
designs were copied in rugs, an error was
deliberately made so that the original design would
still be powerful. Today many of the paintings have
been copied both to preserve the art and for the
record.

60. What is Scroll Painting?
Scroll painting, art form practiced primarily in East
Asia. The two dominant types may be illustrated by
the Chinese landscape scroll, which is that culture’s
greatest contribution to the history of painting, and
the Japanese narrative scroll, which developed the
storytelling potential of painting.

61. What is Sfumato?
Sfumato, (from Italian sfumare, “to tone down” or
“to evaporate like smoke”), in painting or drawing,
the fine shading that produces soft, imperceptible
transitions between colours and tones. It is used
most often in connection with the work of Leonardo
da Vinci and his followers, who made subtle
gradations, without lines or borders, from light to
dark areas; the technique was used for a highly
illusionistic rendering of facial features and for
atmospheric effects. See also chiaroscuro.

62. What is Sgraffito?
Sgraffito, (Italian: “scratched”), in the visual arts, a
technique used in painting, pottery, and glass, which
consists of putting down a preliminary surface,
covering it with another, and then scratching the
superficial layer in such a way that the pattern or
shape that emerges is of the lower colour. During the
Middle Ages, especially in panel painting and in the
illumination of manuscripts, the ground was often
of gold leaf. In wall painting, or mural painting, two
layers of different-coloured plaster are usually
employed.

63. In stained glass, the scratching is done through a top
layer of coloured glass, revealing clear glass beneath;
in pottery the pattern is incised through a white or
coloured slip (mixture of clay and water washed over
the vessel before firing), revealing the body
colour beneath. Sgraffito ware was produced by
Islāmic potters and became common throughout
the Middle East. The 18th-century scratch blue class
of English white stoneware is decorated with
sgraffito patterns touched with blue. Sgraffito ware
was produced as early as 1735 by German settlers in
colonial America.

64. What is Sotto In Su?
Sotto in su, (Italian: “from below to above”) in
drawing and painting, extreme foreshortening of
figures painted on a ceiling or other high surface so
as to give the illusion that the figures are suspended
in air above the viewer. It is an approach that was
developed during the Renaissance, and it was
especially favoured by Baroque and Rococo painters,
particularly in Italy. Andrea Mantegna, Giulio
Romano, Correggio, and Giovanni Battista
Tiepolo were outstanding exponents of the
technique.

65. What is Tachism?
Tachism, French Tachisme, (from tache, “spot”), style of
painting practiced in Paris after World War IIand
through the 1950s that, like its American
equivalent, Action painting, featured the intuitive,
spontaneous gesture of the artist’s brushstroke.
Developed by the young painters Hans Hartung, Gérard
Schneider, Pierre Soulages, Frans Wols, Chao Wu-chi
(Zao Wu-ki), and Georges Mathieu, Tachism was part of
a larger French postwar movement known as Art
Informel, which abandoned geometric abstraction in
favour of a more intuitive form of expression. Art
Informel was inspired by the instinctive, personal
approach of contemporary American Abstract
Expressionism, of which Action painting was one aspect.

66. Like their American counterparts, the French-
educated Tachists worked with a loaded brush,
producing large works of sweeping brushstrokes and
of drips, blots, stains, and splashes of colour. Their
works, however, are more elegant and lyrical—often
including graceful lines and blended, muted
colours—than the works of such American painters
as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, on
whom the French artists modeled themselves. The
Tachists were also less indebted than were the Action
painters to uninhibited psychic inspiration.

67. What is Tempera Painting?
Tempera painting, painting executed
with pigment ground in a water-miscible medium.
The word tempera originally came from the
verb temper, “to bring to a desired consistency.” Dry
pigments are made usable by “tempering” them with
a binding and adhesive vehicle. Such painting was
distinguished from fresco painting, the colours for
which contained no binder. Eventually, after the rise
of oil painting, the word gained its present meaning.

68. What is Tenebrism?
Tenebrism, in the history of Western painting, the use of
extreme contrasts of light and dark in
figurative compositions to heighten their dramatic effect. (The
term is derived from the Latin tenebrae, “darkness.”) In
tenebrist paintings, the figures are often portrayed against a
background of intense darkness, but the figures themselves
are illuminated by a bright, searching light that sets off their
three-dimensional forms by a harsh but exquisitely
controlled chiaroscuro. The technique was introduced by the
Italian painter Caravaggio (1571–1610) and was taken up in
the early 17th century by painters influenced by him,
including the French painter Georges de La Tour, the Dutch
painters Gerrit van Honthorst and Hendrik Terbrugghen, and
the Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbarán.

69. What is Trompe L'oeil?
Trompe l’oeil, (French: “deceive the eye”) in painting, the
representation of an object with such verisimilitude as to
deceive the viewer concerning the material reality of the
object. This idea appealed to the ancient Greeks who were
newly emancipated from the conventional stylizations of
earlier art. Zeuxis, for example, reportedly painted such
realistic grapes that birds tried to eat them. The technique was
also popular with Roman muralists. Although trompe l’oeil
never achieved the status of a major artistic aim, European
painters from the early Renaissance onward occasionally
fostered illusionism by painting false frames out of which the
contents of a still life or portrait appeared to spill or by
creating windowlike images suggesting actual openings in the
wall or ceiling.

70. In Italy in the 15th century an inlay work known
as intarsia was used on choir stalls and in sacristies,
frequently as trompe l’oeil views of cupboards with
different articles seen upon the shelves through half-
open doors. In America the 19th-century still-life
painter William Harnett became famous for his card-rack
paintings, on which are depicted various cards and
clippings with such verisimilitude that the viewer
becomes convinced that they can be lifted off the painted
rack. In the late 20th century, muralist Richard Haas
painted the exteriors of entire buildings in trompe l’oeil,
primarily in Chicagoand New York City. Aaron Bohrod
was one of the foremost 20th-century practitioners of
small-scale trompe l’oeil.

71. What is Watercolor Technique?
 Watercolor was initially developed in Asia during the 8th
century to be laid on fine silks and woven paper. The
paints slowly made their way to Byzantium and Europe
in the 14th century, placing its aesthetic hold onto
illuminated manuscripts, and later rendered itself to the
gossamer aesthetic of the French Impressionists.
 Watercolor paint uses ground pigments mixed with
water-soluble binders. Watercolor painting lends itself to
a gradient of tonal hues that can imitate the washes of
sky and sea, but it is considered one of the most difficult
mediums to master, as it doesn’t lend itself to correction
after application. Many consider Itzchak Tarkay (1935-
2012) to be an especially gifted watercolorist who awed
viewers with his technique.

72. What is Giclee (Gee-Clay) Spray Technique?
 Giclée (pronounced gee-clay) printing is the art medium of
“now,” fusing together traditions of realism and digital
innovation. A French term, translating into “the spraying of
ink,” giclées aren’t simply printed reproductions; rather,
they’re the result of obsessive digital fine-tuning and
modification, and are able to capture great photorealistic
detail. The process begins with a high resolution photograph
of the artwork being translated into giclée form. The image is
then scanned, turned into a digital source file, color corrected,
printed, revised, reprinted – and subject to constant
adjustment until the artist is satisfied with the printed
product.
 Artists liked Pino, Andrew Bone, Scott Jacobs, Autumn
de Forest, and many more have utilized giclées for their
limited edition artworks.

73. What is Underpainting?
I never work from white when using oils or acrylics.
Create an underpainting in burnt umber or a mix of
burnt sienna and phthalo blues to establish shadows
and values. Acrylics are probably the best medium to
use at this stage as they're quick-drying and
permanent.

74. Work paint up from thin to thick, especially when
using slow-drying paints. It's impossible to work on
top of heavy, wet paint. In the same way, work up to
highlights, adding the brightest (and usually heavier)
paint at the end. Have a roll of kitchen towel to hand
to clean brushes and remove any excess paint if you
make a mistake.

75. What is Blocking In?
Brushes come in a number of shapes and with
different fibre types, all of which give very different
results. The key is to try all of them as you paint. The
most versatile are a synthetic/sable mix – these
brushes can be used with most of the different paint
types. Brushes come in flat and round types and it
pays to have a selection of both. Check out our guide
to picking the right brush to learn more.

76. I work with a range of brushes. For most of the early
work I use larger, flatter and broader brushes.
A filbert is a good general brush for blocking in form
and paint. It has a dual nature, combining aspects of
flat and round brushes so it can cover detail as well
as larger areas. I tend to use smaller brushes only at
the end of the painting process.

77. What is Building Up Texture?
 Have a dry, flat brush that you can use to blend your
paint and create smooth transitions. I tend to like
lots of texture and like to see brush marks in my own
work. Almost anything can be used to add texture to
your paint. There are ready-made texture media
available, but I have seen items such as egg shell and
sand used to add interest to a painting.
 One tip is to use an old toothbrush to spatter your
image with paint. This can be remarkably effective at
suggesting noise and grain.

78. What is Dry Brushing?
This is a method of applying colour that only partially
covers a previously dried layer of paint. Add very
little paint to your brush and apply it with very quick,
directional strokes.
This method tends to work best when applying light
paint over dark areas/dried paint and is useful for
depicting rock and grass textures.

79. What is Glazing?
Glazing is the process of laying a coat of transparent
paint over a dry part of the painting, and it's used for
intensifying shadows and modulating colour. A light
transparent blue over dry yellow will of course create
green.

80. What is Painting with Mediums?
Mediums are fluids that can be added to paint to
modulate its consistency, drying time and texture. In
the case of acrylics, you get different mediums that
make the paint matte or gloss. However, I tend to
use the matte medium mainly to seal my paper or
board, so paint doesn't soak into it.