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Watercolor (American English) or watercolour (Commonwealth English; see spelling differences), also aquarelle (; from Italian diminutive of Latin aqua 'water'), is a painting method"Watercolor may be as old as art itself, going back to the Stone Age when early ancestors combined earth and charcoal with water to create the first wet-on-dry picture on a cave wall." in which the are made of suspended in a water-based"Ancient Egyptians used water-soluble translucent paints to decorate papyrus scrolls. They used such earth pigments as ochres and siennas, as well as minerals like reds, cinnabar, blue azure, green malachite, and so on, with gum arabic and egg white. Technically, these water-soluble colors were watercolors." solution. Watercolor refers to both the medium and the resulting artwork. Aquarelles painted with water-soluble colored ink instead of modern water colors are called aquarellum atramento (Latin for "aquarelle made with ink") by experts. However, this term has now tended to pass out of use.
The conventional and most common support—material to which the paint is applied—for watercolor paintings is watercolor paper. Other supports or substrates include stone, ivory, silk, reed, papyrus, bark papers, plastics, vellum, leather, textile, wood, and watercolor canvas (coated with a gesso that is specially formulated for use with watercolors). Watercolor paper is often made entirely or partially with cotton."100% cotton papers are more absorbent in most brands, but there are papers that have only 50% cotton or even high quality papers, which have no blending with cotton." This gives the surface the appropriate texture and minimizes distortion when wet. Watercolor papers are usually cold-pressed papers that provide better texture and appearance. Transparency is the main characteristic of watercolors. "It consists of a mixture of pigments, binders such as gum arabic and humectants such as glycerin, which together with other components, allow the color pigment to join and form the paint paste, which we know as watercolor. With regard to the colors, the quality of the pigments and their degree of concentration, it is what determines how good the watercolor is and also its price. A paint that has a high concentration of pigment, professional type, allows us to use it with a large amount of water without losing the intensity of color." Watercolors can also be made opaque by adding Chinese white. This is not a method to be used in "true watercolor" (traditional)."Turner himself was of the same opinion; he declared to me Munro that water-colour painting would be totally mined, and lose all its individuality and beauty by the bad practice of mingling opaque with transparent colour."
Watercolor paint is an ancient form of painting, if not the most ancient form of art itself. In East Asia, watercolor painting"With the discovery of paper in China around 2000 years ago, the watercolor media took a different route in which the color of the paper played an important role." with inks is referred to as brush painting or scroll painting. In Chinese painting, Korean painting and Japanese painting"Watercolors on silk were frequently used by Chinese and Japanese artists. Their artworks often included calligraphy as well as peaceful nature scenes, animals, and pictures of everyday life." it has been the dominant medium, often in monochrome black or browns, often using inkstick or other pigments. India, Ethiopia and other countries have long watercolor painting traditions as well.
Many Western artists, especially in the early 19th century, used watercolor primarily as a sketching tool in preparation for the "finished" work in oil or engraving. Until the end of the eighteenth century, traditional watercolors were known as 'tinted drawings'."They had a limited range of colours that did not replicate those found in nature and the colours were never applied at their maximum intensity.
Despite this early start, watercolors were generally used by Baroque easel painters only for sketches, copies or modello (full-scale design drawings)During the Baroque era, watercolor was frequently used to decorate naturalist books, albums, and scientific publications, as well as to create hand-painted maps and building drawings. Watercolor portraiture on paper, vellum, and ivory was also quite popular. Notable early practitioners of watercolor painting were Van DyckAnthony Van Dyck (1599 - 1641), a Flemish artist, improved the watercolor painting method by incorporating transparent washes. This was a noteworthy advance in which painters allowed the color of the paper to show through pigments and play a major role in the artwork. (during his stay in England), Claude Lorrain, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, and many Dutch and Flemish people artists.Watercolor was practiced by such masters as Claude Lorrain (1600 or 1604/5 - 1682), Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione (1609 - 1664), and many more Dutch and Flemish baroque artists. However, botanical illustration and Animal painter perhaps form the oldest and most important traditions in watercolor painting. Botanical illustrations became popular during the Renaissance, both as hand-tinted woodcut illustrations in books or broadsheets and as tinted ink drawings on vellum or paper. Botanical artists have traditionally been some of the most exacting and accomplished watercolor painters, and even today, watercolors—with their unique ability to summarize, clarify, and idealize in full color—are used to illustrate scientific and museum publications. Wildlife illustration reached its peak in the 19th century with artists such as John James Audubon, and today many naturalist are still illustrated with watercolor paintings.
In the late 18th century, the English cleric William Gilpin wrote a series of hugely popular books describing his picturesque journeys throughout rural England, and illustrated them with self-made sentimentalized monochrome watercolors of river valleys, ancient castles, and abandoned churches."Turner's apprentice years in the 1790s coincided with the fashion for all things 'Picturesque', an aesthetic taste propagated by William Gilpin (1724–1804), which embraced asymmetrical, broken forms and rough textures, and was epitomised by tumbledown cottages and the ruined abbey-churches laid waste in the Reformation." This example popularized watercolors as a form of personal tourist journal. The confluence of these cultural, engineering, scientific, tourist, and amateur interests culminated in the celebration and promotion of watercolor as a distinctly English "national art". William Blake published several books of hand-tinted engraved poetry, provided illustrations to Dante's Inferno, and he also experimented with large monotype works in watercolor."The artist who most truly brought the eighteenth-century tradition of figurative composition into the early years of the nineteenth century was William Blake." Among the many other significant watercolorists of this period were Thomas Gainsborough,"Many more artists influenced the English watercolor style, including Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788), William Pars (1742-1782), John Sell Cotman (1782-1842), and Samuel Prout (1783–1852)." John Robert Cozens, Francis Towne,"professional artists such as Alexander Cozens (1717–1786) and Francis Towne (1740–1816) travelled extensively in Italy." Michael Angelo Rooker, William Pars,"His study of stonework from the gateway at Battle Abbey, for example, is a colour exercise derived from an earlier watercolour by the eighteenth-century topographical painter, Michael Angelo Rooker (1746– 1801). Using part of Rooker's composition as a starting point, Turner has perfected the process of building up a picture using one application of colour at a time, gradually moving through a scale of tonality from light to dark." Thomas Hearne,"Hearne's style is even more precise and unperturbed than Rooker's. He was born a year or two before Rooker, emerged into public notice about 1765, and after his foreign voyage settled down to a long life of drawing the places of interest in Great Britain, many for a well-known publication called Antiquities of Great Britain, to which he was still contributing as late as 1807." and John Warwick Smith."John 'Warwick' Smith has long been supposed to owe his nickname to the circumstance of his patronage by Lord Warwick, though it may come from his birthplace near the village of Warwick in Cumberland. He was in Rome from 1777 to 1781 and again in 1783. He shows the marks of his travel by an interest in Italian methods of composing landscape and in an enhanced sense of colour (Fig. 23)
From the late 18th century through the 19th century, the market for printed books and domestic art contributed substantially to the growth of the medium."In 1799 the Napoleonic Wars broke out and Europe was closed to the British traveller." Watercolors were used as the basic document from which collectible landscape or tourist engravings were developed, and hand-painted watercolor originals or copies of famous paintings contributed to many upper class art portfolios. Satirical broadsides by Thomas Rowlandson, many published by Rudolph Ackermann, were also extremely popular.
The three English artists credited with establishing watercolor as an independent, mature painting medium are Paul Sandby (1730–1809), often called the "father of the English watercolor"; Thomas Girtin (1775–1802), who pioneered its use for large format, romantic or picturesque landscape painting; and Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851),"He was born in London on 23 April 1775, and given the names Joseph Mallord William Turner. His family called him William but he is now usually referred to by initials as J. M. W. Turner." who brought watercolor painting to the highest pitch of power and refinement,"Girtin and Turner in particular explored the capacity of watercolour for creating atmospheric effects, experimenting with texture and colour." and created hundreds of superb historical, topographical, architectural, and mythological watercolor paintings. His method of developing the watercolor painting in stages, starting with large, vague color areas established on wet paper, then refining the image through a sequence of washes and glazes,"The seemingly effortless freshness of these watercolours disguises the rigorous planning stage that lies behind them. For, between the pencil sketches and the finished watercolours, Turner evolved a creative process that enabled him to experiment in an open-ended fashion with the structure and relative dispositions of colour and light." permitted him to produce large numbers of paintings with "workshop efficiency""One charming account recalls how Turner would hang up his moist studies on cords spread across his room, so that his drying sheets, stained with 'pink and blue and yellow', would at first glance resemble the laundry of a washerwoman." and made him a multimillionaire, partly by sales from his personal art gallery, the first of its kind. Among the important and highly talented contemporaries of Turner and Girtin were John Varley, John Sell Cotman,"John Varley (1778–1842), Thomas Girtin (1775–1802), John Sell Cotman (1782–1842) and David Cox (1783–1859) ushered in the golden age of British watercolour". Copley Fielding, Samuel Palmer,"When it is remembered that men of such diverse gifts and temperaments as David Cox and Samuel Palmer, F.O. Finch and Copley Fielding were his John pupils it will be apparent that he did not impose his own vision on his scholars but, as education truly signifies, drew out of them what was latent in them." William Havell,"William Havell was, at the age of twenty-three, the youngest of the exhibiting members in 1805. His work typifies the common approach of the members of the Society: the dependence of composition on the seventeenth-century landscape painters, the aspiration to vie with oil paintings, the rich tonality of the piece." and Samuel Prout. The Swiss painter Abraham-Louis-Rodolphe Ducros was also widely known for his large format, romantic paintings in watercolor.
The confluence of amateur activity, publishing markets, middle class art collecting, and 19th-century technique led to the formation of English watercolor painting societies: the Society of Painters in Water Colours (1804, now known as the Royal Watercolour Society) and the New Water Colour Society (1832, now known as the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours). (A Scottish Society of Painters in Water Colour was founded in 1878, now known as the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour.)"By the nineteenth century, watercolor had become so popular that several art societies were formed, including the Society of Painters in Water Colours (1804, now the Royal Watercolour Society), the New Water Colour Society (1832, now the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours), and the Scottish Society of Painters in Water Colours (1878, now the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour). The Watercolour Society of Ireland (WCSI) was established in Ireland in 1870, and the Ulster Watercolour Society (UWS) was founded in Northern Ireland. The Russian Watercolor Society was formed in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1880." These societies provided annual exhibitions and buyer referrals for many artists. They also engaged in petty status rivalries and aesthetic debates, particularly between advocates of traditional ("transparent") watercolor and the early adopters of the denser color possible with gouache ("opaque" watercolor). The late Georgian and Victorian periods produced the zenith of the British watercolor, among the most impressive 19th-century works on paper, due to artists Turner, Varley, Cotman,"J.S. Cotman was born in Norwich in 1782; and, having decided that he must devote himself to art, came to London at the age of sixteen or seventeen in 1798. Here he was befriended by Dr Monro, and became another instance of that connoisseur's remarkable flair in choosing promising young men. As were Turner and Girtin five years before, he was set to copy outlines and trace drawings." David Cox, Peter de Wint"The early nineteenth century Girtin, Turner, Cotman, Cox, De Wint, Constable, Bonington, and the Exhibiting Societies". William Henry Hunt, John Frederick Lewis,"Lewis and Hunt were forerunners in an aesthetic shift which is apparent in the watercolours of the next thirty years, towards brilliance of colour and minuteness of touch." Myles Birket Foster,"Birket Foster applies these principlesbrilliance to landscapes in which the emphasis is laid on the charm of summer fields and country lanes and the inhabitants are idealized into the best behaved children or worthy, handsome peasantry." Frederick Walker,"In the next generation of artists the acknowledged leader of the illustrative school was Frederick Walker." Thomas Collier, Arthur Melville and many others. In particular, the graceful, lapidary, and atmospheric watercolors ("genre paintings") by Richard Parkes Bonington"Although he only lived to be twenty-five, Bonington crystallized the prevailing tendencies of his time so well that he not only left a body of great work behind him but he had a strong influence on his contemporaries and successors both in France and England." created an international fad for watercolor painting, especially in England and France in the 1820s. In the latter half of the 19th century, portrait painter Frederick Havill became a key player in the establishment of watercolour in England. Art critic Huntly Carter described Havill as a "founder of the water colour school."
The popularity of watercolors stimulated many innovations, including heavier and more sizing , and brushes (called "pencils") manufactured expressly for watercolor. Watercolor tutorials were first published in this period by Varley, Cox, and others, establishing the step-by-step painting instructions that still characterize the genre today; The Elements of Drawing, a watercolor tutorial by English art critic John Ruskin, has been out of print only once since it was first published in 1857. Commercial brands of watercolor were marketed and paints were packaged in metal tubes or as dry cakes that could be "rubbed out" (dissolved) in studio porcelain or used in portable metal paint boxes in the field. Breakthroughs in chemistry made many new pigments available, including synthetic ultramarine blue, cobalt blue, viridian, cobalt violet, cadmium yellow, aureolin (potassium cobaltinitrite), zinc white, and a wide range of carmine and . These pigments, in turn, stimulated a greater use of color with all painting media, but in English watercolors, particularly by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
The adoption of brightly colored, petroleum-derived aniline dyes (and pigments compounded from them), which all fade rapidly on exposure to light, and the efforts to properly conserve the twenty thousand J. M. W. Turner paintings inherited by the British Museum in 1857, led to a negative reevaluation of the permanence of pigments in watercolor. This caused a sharp decline in their status and market value. Nevertheless, isolated practitioners continued to prefer and develop the medium into the 20th century. Paul Signac created landscape and maritime watercolors, and Paul Cézanne developed a watercolor painting style consisting entirely of overlapping small glazes of pure color.
Although the rise of abstract expressionism, and the trivializing influence of amateur painters and advertising- or workshop-influenced painting styles, led to a temporary decline in the popularity of watercolor painting after ,"Watercolor art in the United States declined after the 1950s, giving place to abstract expressionism." watercolors continue to be utilized by artists like Martha Burchfield, Joseph Raffael, Andrew Wyeth, Philip Pearlstein,"However, artists such as Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), Philip Pearlstein (born 1924), Joseph Raffael (born 1933), and many others continued to create in this medium." Eric Fischl, Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, and Francesco Clemente. In Spain, Ceferí Olivé created an innovative style followed by his students, such as Rafael Alonso López-Montero and Francesc Torné Gavaldà. In Mexico, the major exponents are Ignacio Barrios, Edgardo Coghlan, Ángel Mauro, Vicente Mendiola, and Pastor Velázquez. In the Canary Islands, where this pictorial technique has many followers, there are stand-out artists such as Francisco Bonnín Guerín, José Comas Quesada, and Alberto Manrique.
The more general term watermedia refers to any painting medium that uses water as a solvent and that can be applied with a brush, pen, or sprayer. This includes most , watercolors, , casein paint, , and modern .
The term "watercolor" refers to paints that use water-soluble, complex carbohydrates as a binder. Originally (in the 16th to 18th centuries), watercolor binders were sugars and/or hide glues, but since the 19th century, the preferred binder is natural gum arabic, with glycerin and/or honey as additives to improve plasticity and solubility of the binder, and with other chemicals added to improve product shelf life.
The term "bodycolor" refers to paint that is opaque rather than transparent. It usually refers to opaque watercolor, known as gouache. Modern acrylic paints use an acrylic resin dispersion as a binder.
Modern commercial watercolor paints are available in tubes, pans and liquids."...in general it can be liquid, creamy in tubes, solid, in the form of pans, chalk pastels, waxes, markers, pencils, etc." The majority of paints sold today are in collapsible small metal tubes in standard sizes and formulated to a consistency similar to toothpaste by being already mixed with a certain water component. For use, this paste has to be further diluted with water. Pan paints (small dried cakes or bars of paint in an open plastic container) are usually sold in two sizes, full pans and half pans.
Owing to modern industrial organic chemistry, the variety, colorfulness, and permanence of artists' colors available today has been vastly improved. Correct and non-toxic primary colors are now present through the introduction of hansa yellow, phthalo blue and quinacridone. From such a set of three colors, in principle all others can be mixed, as in a classical technique no white is used. The modern development of pigments was not driven by artistic demand. The art materials industry is too small to exert any market leverage on global dye or pigment manufacture. With rare exceptions such as aureolin, all modern watercolor paints utilize pigments that have a wider industrial use. Paint manufacturers buy, by industrial standards very small, supplies of these pigments, mill them with the vehicle, solvent, and additives, and package them. The milling process with inorganic pigments, in more expensive brands, reduces the particle size to improve the color flow when the paint is applied with water.
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