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Painting technique is a dauntingly large, and rather vague, subject to discuss. We could provisionally define “technique” as the skills involved in accomplishing a certain artistic intent. But this leaves the notion of “artistic intent” unexamined (it obviously takes...

At this point the physics of light becomes less important than simply positing some useful models of colour organization. The colour wheel introduced above must be familiar to most readers, but if it is given three “spokes” or diameters then we have three axes of the...

It must be obvious that studio practice in colour use long pre-dates scientific theories which attempt to explain it. Only one artistic movement, the neo-impressionism of Seurat and Signac, attempted to order the former according to the latter. For preceding ages the...

As said previously, drawing and painting are ultimately inseparable activities, and underpainting is often confusingly termed underdrawing .But this at least elucidates its function. In the 15th century both northern and southern European artists, having prepared...

Experts must forgive this somewhat bald classification which is only adopted to be concise. Flemish 15th century artists quickly exploited the way in which oil paint could create rich colour effects by means of successive layers of thin transparent paint of similar or...

In the hands of 16th century Venetian and some central Italian artists glazing methods were adapted to attain more adventurous effects. These tended to use the mixing principles stipulated in the previous section., and usually presupposed an overall coloured priming,...

This is a common term for method (i)above, and is clearly the one familiar to most painters today. It must seem self- evident to us that mixing distinct colours (e.g blue and yellow) produces others, but to the medieval artist this appears to have been unknown. Since...

A support is whatever material onto which the paint of an artwork, including the primer, is applied. Slate, marble, copper, aluminium, glass and paper have all been used with some success as supports for oil paint, but many of these require unusual preparation and...

Usually, artists think about the choice of priming as they make their choice of support. The priming can be defined as the liquid application that, when dry, to some extent isolates paint layers from the support. This is necessary in the cases of wood and canvas,...

As is evident, a semi-absorbent layer of size is necessary for both oil and gesso primings. Art shops will sell size of sufficient quality for this purpose; decorators’ “size” sold in DIY stores may not be good enough, and may not be rabbit-skin glue at all. Size is...