Water- Color Painting at www.japanese-home-gardens.com

For use in water- color paintingcolor painting, the pigments common to all types of painting are made up with gum into cakes or tubes. When moistened with a brush dipped into water this concentrated pigment dissolves into so thin a wash that a transparent layer of color can be laid upon the surface to be painted, which is usually paper. The characteristic quality of water color comes from the reflection of the white surface of the paper through the thin wash of pigment; this gives a glowing, luminous effect which is seen at its purest when the separate tones are applied in comparatively broad areas and not too much broken up. Should the artist wish to use an opaque wash in place of a transparent one, he can mix the water color with Chinese, or flake, white; the resulting medium is known as gouache, or body color. Works carried out either in pure water color, pure body color, or water color and body color mixed are known interchangeably as water- color paintingcolor paintings or water- color paintingcolor drawings.

Methods akin to water- color paintingcolor painting, such as fresco and tempera painting, have been used from the beginning of art. Illuminated manuscripts and portrait miniatures are executed in water color and body color, but these form distinct branches of art in their own right. Again, the brush has been used universally alongside the pen and the chalk as an implement for drawing. It was only a short step from the use of monochrome washes in drawings to the use of color with pen or chalk outlines, and many of the Old Masters made drawings with these materials.

English Water Colors: 1750-1850.-If we seek reasons for the enthusiasm for this medium, we find that English patrons were beginning to demand the portrayal of places with known associations, and were cultivating that love of landscape which reached its peak in the painting, no less than the poetry, of the romantic movement. Water color was found to be especially fit for rendering the nuances of cloudy skies and the varied greens of foliage, and for echoing those effects of atmosphere and mist in the absence of which landscape painting can become a mere unimaginative transcript of fact, without emotional comment. The first considerable artist to devote most of his career to painting in water color was Paul Sandby (1725-1809).