Unusual Art Materials and Ideas
According to Mark Balma, Leonard Da Vinci was an innovator in the realm of painting, as well as his many other inventions. In the previous tradition before Leonardo, painters would start out with a toned ground or imprimatura to set the canvas tone somewhere between bright white and very dark. …
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2019 is Leonardo da Vinci’s 500th Anniversary. In the articles and videos that follow on this page, Leonardo specialist and artist Mark Balma explores Leonardo’s painting materials and techniques. Mark Balma’s portraits include four U.S. Presidents and two paintings in the Vatican’s permanent collection. His fresco murals can be found …
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Globally we are coming full circle, returning to biobased materials. In fact, many early artist materials were based on natural oils, rosins, waxes, gums, polysaccharides, and other materials. One of the largest global manufacturers of raw paint materials (with offices in 50 countries) recently commented: Raw material suppliers recognize that …
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Much of today’s art places stress on bright colors and strong sharp lines. In a gallery the “high contrast” look will always stand out, leaping off the wall. However, there is something lost in this clarity – the sense of distance, the sense of fading mystery. Few painters in our …
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Can a culture develop an identity around certain colors? In the case of Indian Yellow, it appears to be the case. Indian Yellow, a beautiful yellow with overtones of vermilion, has been worn in India for centuries. Some say the process for making it was brought to India from Persia …
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Bruges, in the Flemish region of Belgium, is sometimes called the “Venice of the North”. During the 1400s, it was home to such famous painters as Jan van Eyck, Geerard David, Roger van der Weyden and Hans Memling. This is the period when oil painting took over from egg tempera. …
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In the mid-19th century, King Ludwig I of Bavaria longed to have something like the fine lime frescoes he saw in Italy. But the damp cold climate north of the Alps destroyed anything the artists did within a short period of time. So Ludwig called on Bavarian scientists to produce …
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“The tendency to put in more and more white is so usual that it would be well to restrict the white. Keep it off the palette. Allow only so much of it in the pigments which must have it, and allow them much less than you think they should have.” …
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Artists sometimes are fascinated by the search for a “Secret” that makes old master paintings last so long and look so great. One eighteenth century painter, Sir Joshua Reynolds, suggested the secret was a red oxide pigment named after the Turkish city Sinop. Reynolds believed that the secret pigment had …
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According to legend, Giotto was the ugliest artist in town, but he was also the greatest illusionist. As a boy, Giotto was able to work under Cimabue, the highly renowned master painter in Florence. Cimabue had seen Giotto scratching images of sheep on a rock, and decided to take him …
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