Pieta Fine Art

A guide to paintings and prints

Purchasing fine art can at times be confusing, there are hundreds of terms denoting different styles and techniques of art which may for the novice buyer seem like gobbledegook. Hopefully this guide will prove helpful when it comes to making that first, second or even hundredth special purchase!

Paintings:

As a rule of thumb, we can divide paintings into two categories: oil paintings and watercolour paintings. (there are others such as tempera, encaustic etc but uncommon)

Oil paintings - The term oil painting is used to describe any painting done with an oil based paint. This essentially means that the 'pigment' or colour powder has been mixed with oil to enable it to adhere to whatever surface the artist has chosen to paint on. Commonly, this surface which is technically called a 'support' is either canvas or wood, however it can also be metal such as zinc, copper etc or wood derivatives like plywood and card - basically, anything the artist chooses to paint on! Different supports produce different overall effects and texture. The oil 'medium' (another word for type) enables rich and vivid colours, fine detail and a wealth of textures. It is a difficult medium to master and oil paint takes a few days to dry, so it is common for an artist to take ages on just one painting and they are usually done indoors. The paint is generally applied with a brush, but it is not uncommon for the artist to use a pallet knife, their hands or anything they like really to apply the paint!

Watercolour paintings - If we were being pedantic we would say there's no such thing as a watercolour painting, because officially they're drawings. However, because the paint is applied with a brush everyone calls them paintings. It's one of those stupid rules like saying a tomato is a vegetable. We know its officially a fruit, but come on, we don't put pears on our pizza do we. So most people who aren't pedantic call watercolour drawings, paintings. Basically, watercolours are paintings done with (yes, you guessed it) waterbased paint. The pigment is mixed with water to enable it to adhere to the support. The support has to be porus otherwise the paint just runs off and creates a mess, so the favoured support is usually a thick woven paper, but it is not unusual to find watercolours on materials such as ivory and bone. Watercolours dry fairly quickly, so are generally done in little time, often en plein air - a French term used to describe painting outdoors. Watercolour paint is quite translucent and translates well for landscapes although there are many types of waterbased paint such as gouache and acrylic which offer brighter colours and less translucence due to the increased amount of pigment.

Prints:

Prints are made using a printing plate which is inked and then pressed onto paper so that many identical or near identical copies can be made. We can divide prints into three basic categories: relief, planographic and intaglio. Confused already? Well lets see if I can make some sense of these terms!

The essential difference between these three terms is thus:

Relief: If we have a flat printing plate which can be any number of materials such as wood, lino or even half a potato and carved an X shape into it, everything surrounding the X would be higher or raised in comparison. If you covered it in ink and pressed it into a piece of paper, this raised bit would print and the carved bit wouldn't. The most common forms of relief printing are woodcuts, wood engravings and linocuts. Because the area that's raised carries the ink, relief prints don't need that much pressure to print from, so you could make a print with your potato without needing a press.

Planographic: Take our flat printing plate again, but this time we don't cut into it, but we use some chemicals to repell ink from areas. Essentially, planographic processes are used mostly today in books, newspapers, posters etc because we got really clever at using chemicals! The most common form of planographic printing is lithography and offset lithography.

Intaglio: Basically the opposite of relief printing. Lines are incised into a plate (generally metal) - ink is then applied to the plate but the raised areas are wiped free of ink leaving only the incised lines with ink and then the plate is printed onto paper using a press. The press needed to print such plates needs to produce an awful lot of downforce and the paper is often quite thick, so you end up with not only the ink adhering to the paper, but an indentation in the paper called a plate mark. The most common forms of intaglio printing are steel plate engravings, copper plate engravings and etchings.

O.K. So we have our three categories of prints, but these are very basic descriptions. If you want to know more about the methods employed within these categories read on!

sales@pietafineart.com