NOTES ON STEVEN BLEICHER'S CONTEMPORARY COLOR: THEORY & USE CHAPTER 4
-Prehistoric artists worked in what must have been smoky conditions, using minerals as pigments for their images. Reds, yellows, and blacks were the predominant colours used. Red came from hematite, either raw or as found within red clay and ochre. Yellow was found in iron oxyhydroxides, and black either in charcoal or manganese oxides. The pigments could be prepared by grinding, mixing, or heating, after which they were transferred onto the cave walls. The earliest known pigments used were a limited natural color range. www.worldhistory.org/Lascaux_Cave/
-Ground pigments are the actual source of color in paints, colored pencils, and pastels. Tens of thousands of years ago, humans discovered that combining colored earth with a sticky liquid such as animal fats resulted in something that could be used to make a mark. These primitive paints were often made from colored rocks, earth, bone, and minerals, which could be ground into powders, and mixed with egg or animal byproducts to bind the solution and make paint.
- During Classical Greco-Roman, Early Christian and Gothic Eras, Western painters made their own paints by grinding pigment into oil.
-During the Early and Middle Modern era, paints were sold in pig bladders.
-By the Industrial Revolution, c. mid 1800s, the invention of the metal tube allowed for the commercial production and distribution of oil paints.
-Oil paint consists of small grains of pigment suspended in oil. Although it appears smooth to the naked eye, on a microscopic level, particles of pigment are suspended in oil, as fruit is suspended in a set gelatin mold. www.webexhibits.org/pigments/intro/pain…
-The Fundamental Information on a Paint (Tube) Label includes:
--Manufacturer's name
--Common color name
--Names of the pigment(s) used.
--The color index names and number(s)
--The vehicle the pigment is suspended in (e.g., acrylic polymer emulsion for acrylic paint, or gum arabic for watercolor and gouache).
--Lightfastness or permanence rating
--Size of paint tube or container
-Paintbrushes come in many shapes, sizes, and bristle types—and all these qualities can be either an aid or an impediment to an artist, depending on their desired results.
-Different types of brushes are used for different media. When it comes to bristles, artists can choose between animal hair (such as hog bristle, sable, and mongoose) or synthetic bristles.
-For oil and acrylic painters, long-handled easel paint brushes with soft bristles make smooth paint strokes. For blended, flat paint surfaces, sable, mongoose, or soft synthetic brushes are ideal. Long-bristled, soft brushes are excellent for making irregular, “hairy” marks at the end of a brushstroke.
-Long-handled easel paint brushes with coarser bristles are a good choice for creating rough effects or the thick impasto strokes. Hog bristle and stiff, springy synthetics are well-suited to heavy paint and will leave painterly tracks in the pigment.
-Flat brushes are versatile, while round brushes come in pointed and blunt tips. Filberts have long, tapered tongue-shaped bristles. The bright is a short-bristled, flat brush that’s ideal for short, controlled strokes. The fan brush is a splayed, flat brush with a round tip. And rigger brushes are thin rounds with very long bristles.
-Watercolorists use soft, short-handled brushes in many of the same shapes that oil and acrylic painters use, with two notable additions: the wash and the mop brushes.
www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-1…
-Masstone / Undertone
The masstone of a paint is simply its color when applied thickly enough to completely cover a surface. Ex. See top right. No other colors from below show through.
The undertone, by contrast, is visible when we spread the color very thinly over a white surface. Ex. See bottom right.
Certain colors, like Cadmiums and Cobalts, have similar masstones and undertones.
Transparent, organic colors like the Quinacridones and Phthalos, the undertone can be quite different from one another.
justpaint.org/the-nomenclature-of-color/
-Watercolor paint is made of a few simple ingredients, but the two main components are the pigment to provide the color, and the binder gum-arabic to provide the color vehicle.
-Watercolor paints also contain some other additives which alter the paint’s appearance, the way the paint performs, and to extend the shelf life of the product.
-There are over 100 natural or synthetic pigments used in artist’s watercolor paint. Some of the natural pigments are hard to acquire, which makes certain colors more expensive.
-Because gum arabic and synthetic binders tend to dry too quickly and become too hard, watercolor paint includes a moisturizer and a plasticizer. The type of moisturizer used is often glucose (for example corn syrup) or sometimes even honey!
-A small amount of brightener is sometimes added to watercolor paint. This is usually transparent or white crystals which enhance the color of the pigment, or adjust the lightness of the paint when dried.
www.watercoloraffair.com/what-is-waterc…
-Oil paint is a type of slow-drying paint that consists of pigment particles suspended in a linseed oil binder. The viscosity of the paint may be modified by the addition of a solvent such as turpentine or white spirit, and varnish may be added to increase the glossiness of the dried oil paint. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_paint
-Acrylic paint is a fast-drying paint made of pigment particles suspended in acrylic polymer emulsion and plasticizers, silicon oils, defoamers, stabilizers, or metal soaps.[2] Most acrylic paints are water-based but become water-resistant when dry. Depending on how much the paint is diluted with water, or modified with acrylic gels, mediums, or pastes, the finished acrylic painting can resemble a watercolor, a gouache, or an oil painting, or have its own unique characteristics not attainable with other media.[3]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylic_paint
-Encaustic is a wax-based paint, composed of beeswax, resin and pigment* that during application, is kept molten on a heated palette. To fuse the paint to a surface, it is applied then reheated. The word ‘encaustic’ comes from the Greek word enkaiein, meaning to burn in, referring to this fusing process.
-And encaustic as versatile as any 21st century medium. It can be polished to a high gloss, carved, scraped, layered, collaged, dipped, cast, modeled, sculpted, textured, and combined with oil. It cools immediately, so that there is no drying time, yet it can always be reworked.
-Since the varnish is intrinsic to its formulation, encaustic paintings do not need additional varnishing or added protection. Beeswax is impervious to moisture, a major cause of paint deterioration. Wax resists moisture far more than resin varnish or oil.
www.rfpaints.com/encaustic
-Types of Digital Printer Inks
-Two of the most common types of printers are laser printers and inkjet printers.
-Laser printers use powdered toner. Toner “ink” is a dry powder composed of many plastic particles. The toner is heated and applied to the printing surface with a drum.
-Inkjet printers use ink cartridges filled with tinted liquid ink and additives. Liquid Ink is made in both fugitive, dye-based and archival, pigment-based forms.
--Fugitive dye-based liquid inks are typically used in production printing.
--Archival pigment-based inks are used in fine-art Giclee printing.
-Solid ink, which has a waxy crayon-like consistency is used in some printers instead of liquid ink. Solid ink printers heat the ink and apply it to the printing surface, where it dries and cures.
-Ribbon Ink is most often used with dot matrix printers and thermal transfer printers. With impact and dot matrix printers, an ink-soaked ribbon is pressed against the page to print. With thermal transfer printers, the ribbon has a wax or resin coating that is melted by a heated print head to expose the ink and print it on the page.
-UV-ink is cured onto the printing surface in the presence of UV light. This type of ink dries very quickly, and it is among the most expensive.
-3D Printing ink is not actually ink but is the 3D printing material. Materials that most 3D printers use is resin! While fairly pricey, 3D printing resin is available in a wide range of colors and various materials.
www.cdw.com/content/cdw/en/articles/har…
-Colored pencil leads contain a combination of pigments, binders, resins, and often wax. The best quality colored pencils have a higher concentration of pure pigment. (In graphite pencils, the “lead” is not real lead either, but graphite)
-A Crayon is an implement for drawing made from clay, chalk,
graphite, dry color, and wax.
-There are two types of crayons: the coloring crayon and the chalk crayon.
The coloring crayon, or wax crayon, is the one used by most children in making pictures, but artists also use it. It consists of waxes such as paraffin, beeswax, and carnauba wax and dry colour.
-Some synthetic wax-like materials are also used in the modern crayon. The waxes are melted and the dry colour added with continuous mixing until thoroughly dispersed.
-Fine art chalk crayons come in various formulations, Ex. conté crayon, lithographic crayon, pastels.
-Normally, with both chalk and wax based, the crayon is entirely consumed during the marking process through abrasion.
www.britannica.com/art/crayon
-Pastels are pigments mixed with a binder. It is a medium in the form of a stick or crayon, consisting of powdered pigments and a binder. The pigments used in pastels are like those used to produce some other colored visual arts media, like oil paint, except the binder is typically much drier.
-The color effect of pastels is closer to the natural dry pigments than that of any other process. Pastels have been used by artists since the Renaissance and gained popularity in the 18th and 19th centuries.
-See Mary Cassatt’s ‘At the Theater’ and notice the juxtaposition of the use of complementary hues, which add to the atmospheric quality of light produced in her pastel drawing.
-Alternative Media
-Powdered Kool-Aid ingredients:
CITRIC ACID, CALCIUM PHOSPHATE, MALTODEXTRIN, CONTAINS LESS THAN 2% OF ASCORBIC ACID (VITAMIN C), NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL FLAVOR, Contains Less than 2% of Artificial Flavor, Acesulfame Potassium (Sweetener), Sucrose Acetate Isobutyrate, Red 40, colored dyes, Sodium Benzoate and Potassium Sorbate (Preservatives)
-In his Untitled (Kool-Aid), 2003, conceptual artist David Hammons uses a staining technique to create a large-scale drawing with Kool-Aid. The soft drink has a very pale color and blends much the same as any water-based media. It’s not an archival medium, so along with its pop-culture status, and its “consume-ability”, the fugitive nature of the work is also intrinsic or underlies its meaning.
-Color Film: daylight vs. tungsten
-Films have different color spaces and are designed to work with a specific light source.
-Analog photographers used daylight-balanced film when they worked in daylight or with flash. Color film was designed for use in daylight or flash shows a distinct orange cast if used under tungsten lights.
-Analog photographers used tungsten film when using studio or domestic tungsten lights. Tungsten film was designed to accurately represent colors as perceived by humans under tungsten light.
eeswarcreativestudio.com/daylight-and-t…
The first color tattoos were Ancient Egyptian. Any tattoos prior were done in black. Based on artifacts and trinkets found from the ancient eras, it is believed that Ancient Inuit and Ancient Romans also tattooed in color. The Inuit were especially fond of dark yellow tones.
-Color tattoos became fashionable in the 17th century Japan. Then tattooing stopped being thought of as a punishment and started to become seen as an art form. And color tattoos became fashionable in the USA and UK at the end of the 19th century. They only used very basic tattoo colors, as artworks show red, blue, yellow and greens were popular. The popularity of tattoo colors is connected to the advances to tattoo ink. www.savedtattoo.com/tattoo-colors/
-Tattoo inks may be made from titanium dioxide, lead, chromium, nickel, iron oxides, ash, carbon black, and other ingredients. Today some of the pigments are industrial grade and used as automobile paint.
naturallysavvy.com/care/are-tattoos-saf…
-Sand painting is the art of pouring coloured sands, and powdered pigments from minerals or crystals, or pigments from other natural or synthetic sources onto a surface to make a fixed or unfixed sand painting.
-Powdered pigments* come from such materials as pulverized cedar charcoal, red sandstone, white gypsum, yellow ocher, pollen, cornmeal, and crushed flower petals. These paintings average about six feet square, though they range in size from a foot to twenty feet or more in diameter.
-Unfixed sand paintings have a long-established cultural history in numerous social groupings around the globe, and are often temporary, ritual paintings prepared for religious or healing ceremonies. This form of art is also referred to as drypainting.
-Drypainting is practiced by Native Americans in the Southwestern United States, by Tibetan and Buddhist monks, as well as Indigenous Australians, and by Latin Americans on certain Christian holy days. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandpainting
www.collectorsguide.com/fa/fa083.shtml
-Ceramic glazes need to include a ceramic flux which functions by promoting partial liquefaction in the clay bodies and the other glaze materials. Fluxes lower the high melting point of the glass forms silica, and sometimes boron trioxide. These glass forms may be included in the glaze materials or may be drawn from the clay beneath.
-Raw materials of ceramic glazes generally include silica, which will be the main glass former. Various metal oxides, such as sodium, potassium, and calcium, act as flux and therefore lower the melting temperature. Alumina, often derived from clay, stiffens the molten glaze to prevent it from running off the piece.[3] -Colorants, such as iron oxide, copper carbonate, or cobalt carbonate,[3] and sometimes opacifiers like tin oxide or zirconium oxide, are used to modify the visual appearance of the fired glaze.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceramic_glaze
-To create his Architectural Vessel, Rick Foris used a combination of wheel throwing and slab construction. The surface’s metallic luster comes from a sprayed copper matte glaze was created by raku processes, which oxidize the clay and bring out unique colors.
