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Course: Europe 1300 - 1800 > Unit 3
Lesson 1: A beginner's guide- How to recognize Italian Renaissance art
- Tiny timelines: global Europe
- Napoleon’s appropriation of Italian cultural treasures
- The study of anatomy
- Contrapposto explained
- Florence in the Early Renaissance
- Alberti’s revolution in painting
- Linear Perspective: Brunelleschi's Experiment
- How one-point linear perspective works
- Early Applications of Linear Perspective
- Linear perspective interactive
- Images of African Kingship, Real and Imagined
- A primer for Italian renaissance art
- Introduction to gender in renaissance Italy
- The Italian renaissance court artist
- The status of the artist in renaissance Italy
- Female artists in the renaissance
- The role of the workshop in Italian renaissance art
- Humanism in renaissance Italy
- Humanism in Italian renaissance art
- Why commission artwork during the renaissance?
- Types of renaissance patronage
- Renaissance Watercolours: materials and techniques
- Retro style in the Renaissance
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Renaissance Watercolours: materials and techniques
Renaissance artists used unique materials and techniques to create stunning watercolor paintings. They mixed pigments with water and gum arabic, a natural binder, to make their paints. They then applied these paints to paper, creating vibrant and detailed artworks. These techniques helped shape the art world and are still used today!
Want to join the conversation?
- why did they use oyster shells to hold the pigments and paints?(2 votes)
- It wasn't anything special about the material. It was their ubiquity, size and shape. Oyster shells are plentiful and cheap. After one has eaten the animal that grew in it, the shell is free! An oyster shell fits comfortably in the hand that is not holding the brush. An oyster shell is like a cup, so stuff doesn't run off of it.(4 votes)
- why do. they use pigments.(2 votes)
- "pigments" are the parts of paint that give it color. "Paint" is just something into which to add pigments and bind them to the surface upon which it is applied. "Paint" is, essentially, colorless. Without pigments, "Paint" is like oil, or shellac, or egg yolks, or water.(2 votes)
- audio balancing is important you know.(2 votes)
Video transcript
For many Renaissance painters, watercolour was
the medium of choice for capturing the world in fine detail. Watercolour paint is made of pigment particles mixed
with a binder like gum arabic or animal glue in water. Today, watercolour artists mix water with ready-made paint
and apply it to paper, creating a transparent wash. But during the Renaissance, artists used watercolour paint
in a number of ways to create a variety of objects: illuminated manuscripts, portrait miniatures, and coloured drawings. Artists chose to use watercolour deliberately, rather than another
medium like oil, for its technical properties and the effects it produced. ‘Illuminated’ means to give light. Artists used watercolour for illuminated manuscripts as
it reflects light, creating the desired luminosity for these books. Illuminated manuscripts were often decorated
with small-scale paintings in minute detail. Watercolour can be applied with a very fine brush
and with precision to create this detail. Another practical advantage of watercolour is that the paint dries
very quickly, unlike oil, which can take up to a year to fully dry so the pages could be bound without danger
of them sticking together. And once dried, watercolour on parchment
is more pliable than oil so the manuscript pages could be easily flexed
and turned without cracking the paint layers. Renaissance artists also preferred watercolour for painting
portrait miniatures – tiny images that could be held in the hand. In an age before photography, miniatures were used to
accurately depict a person’s appearance, often a loved one. As watercolour paint reflects more light than oil paint, it was used
to give a purer, brighter and more lively appearance to the sitter. Miniaturists were called ‘limners’,
which means ‘those who give light’. Perhaps the most famous Renaissance limner, Nicholas Hilliard,
painted this miniature of his wife Alice in 1578. Here you can see areas of opaque ‘bodycolour’. This is also watercolour paint, but it is made
using a higher proportion of pigment to binder to achieve rich and smooth areas
of colour that are not transparent. Hilliard would have painted this miniature
directly from life in several stages, layer by layer. The advantage of using watercolour
is that each layer would dry quickly enough for the painter to move on to
the next stage of the painting. After applying the main areas of colour, Hilliard would have
added fine details to capture his wife’s likeness. Watercolour enabled Hilliard to paint
these details at this incredibly small scale. Jacques le Moyne de Morgues was one of many 16th-century artists
who chose to use watercolour to record the natural world. He would have used watercolour to paint objects like this because
it enabled him to capture the true-to-life colours of the fruit immediately. The way he painted has the most similarities with
what we think of as watercolour painting today. You can see here that Le Moyne used black chalk
to draw the rough outline of the leaf. Watercolour artists today often start with
a sketched outline too, using pencil. Le Moyne would have made the watercolour paint himself
by grinding the pigment and mixing it with powdered gum arabic. By doing this himself, he could vary
the consistencies of the paint. In some places, you can see he used more roughly ground paint
with large pigment particles to create texture. With pre-ground paint, most watercolourists
today create texture in other ways. Here a modern-day artist uses a relatively dry brush to produce
a stippling effect to mimic the interior texture of a pomegranate. To show highlights, Le Moyne used a variety of techniques. He made the white highlights on the pomegranate stem
with white bodycolour – opaque watercolour paint. But he created the highlights on the red seeds
by simply leaving the white paper underneath unpainted. This is a technique that watercolour artists continue to use,
seen here on both the outside of this pomegranate and on the seeds. Today, watercolour remains a versatile medium, ideal for capturing life-like details that help us to record
and understand our diverse and colourful world.