What is Watercolor Painting

Introduction

Simply, watercolor is a compound that paints and uses water-soluble pigments that are either transparent or opaque.

Here, experienced watercolor painter Chayim Shvarzblat, will explain more in dept what watercolor painting is and when it originated.

By means of it as well as the paper to which this is applied, watercolor is often considered to be a fugitive medium. While watercolor cannot be a rival of oils when it comes to durability and longevity, this is a medium that has a very long and distinguished history and, clearly, a healthy future.

As Chayim Shvarzblat explains, while American artists in the early 19th century seemed to consider watercolor primarily as a sketching instrument, preparatory to the "finished" work in oil or engraving, English artists in the mid-1700s had already raised watercolor to an equal medium to grease. In England, watercolor has been firstly used by architectural draftsmen and surveyors, but soon watercolorists (presented) figures in their compositions. This took Homer Winslow's genius to reveal to American artists the extraordinary potential of watercolor as a means of serious expression. Once accepted, watercolor became an inevitable medium for the American painter from the beginning, a fact that paints one of the dominant features of the American art tradition. The inherent luminosity of watercolor, combined with its ability for rapid execution, gave an ideal means to landscape painters to record the brief effects of nature.

“The history of watercolor is inextricably tied to the history of paper, invented in its present form by the Chinese, shortly after 100 years. The paper was introduced (presented) to Spain by the victorious Moors in the mid-twelfth century and then to Italy 25 years later,” says Chayim Shvarzblat.

The precursor of watercolor painting was the fresco buon painting: the watercolor used to paint the walls on the wet plaster. The most famous example of fresco buon is, of course, the Sistine Chapel, begun in 1508 and completed in 1514. In Europe, in the fifteenth century, Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) painted in watercolor. Dürer's influence was partly responsible for the first watercolor school he paints in Europe, led by Hans Bol (1534-1593).

Watercolor Techniques

The experienced painter, Chayim Shvarzblat points out that watercolors are obtained by agglutination of dry powder pigments mixed with gum arabic, which is extracted from the acacia and which solidifies by evaporation, but which is soluble in water. The watercolors, in solid state, are dissolved in water and applied on the paper with a brush. Although watercolor is a relatively modern type of painting, different water-based paints have been used throughout history. The first watercolors can be considered to be the papyri of ancient Egypt, and the early oriental ink drawings are actually a monochrome watercolor form. In medieval Europe, water soluble pigments bound with an egg-derived densifier were used for mined manuscripts; in the same way, the medieval frescoes were painted with pigments mixed with water thickened with opaque white paint. Chayim Shvarzblat claims in his articles on Academia, that, subsequently, other types of opaque water-soluble paints emerged, very close to watercolors, such as gouache, which is still used today.