Welcome to

The Painting Lesson

by Linda Carson

big black pig studio
98 King St. N., Waterloo Ontario Canada
www.bigblackpig.com

Paint is just coloured glue

Paint is made of coloured stuff—the pigment—and something sticky to glue the colour onto the image—the binder. The binder may also need to be dissolved by a solvent to keep the paint fluid while working. Paint dries when the solvent evaporates off. Some paints also contain fillers and special ingredients to control the texture, drying time or surface finish. All this stuff that's wrapped around the colour—binder and solvent and secret ingredients—is collectively called the medium.

Ultramarine blue pigment and lapis lazuli

For example: Ultramarine blue is a colour of pigment. It was traditionally made by grinding the semi-precious stone, lapis lazuli, to a fine powder.

The pigments are the same for all sorts of paints. A pigment is a coloured, lightfast material that can be ground to a fine powder and mixed in paint without reacting chemically to its neighbours. Burnt umber acrylic paints use the same chocolate-brown pigment as you find in burnt umber oil paints and burnt umber watercolours. What differs from one paint type to another—a type of paint is also called a medium, I'm afraid—is the sort of glue or binder that sticks it down.

Watercolours, for example, are bound with a sticky plant sap, usually gum arabic. Its solvent is water, and that's also what you use to thin the paint and clean your brushes.

Sampler designed by Linda Carson, stitched by husband-of-the-year Jim Gardner

P.S. If you need to impress a stickler, remember that the plural of "medium" is "media," not "mediums." Used in a sentence:

"Why is watercolour a tough medium? The stuff's see-through!
At least with opaque media you can hide your mistakes."

You'll hear it both ways, of course, because not everyone's a stickler about these things. I am. To me, "mediums" are spooky women with hoop earrings and crystal balls.

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Art & Text (C) Linda Carson 2002

Loosely translated, that means:
"Please don't copy this material or redistribute it in some other form, for any reason. This is my livelihood."