Paint

Remember back in your elementary school days during art time when you used to play with paint? Those days were awesome and also a great way to start off a child's use of art. Defining the word "paint" in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, paint is the decorative and protective coating commonly applied to rigid surfaces as a liquid consisting of a pigment suspended in a vehicle, or binder. Paint comes a various colors, from original, basic red to an electric, eye-catching green.

Being an artist and experimenting with the different elements and compositions of art, paint has a variety of mediums. There are:

• Oil
• Acrylic
• Watercolor

Oil

Oil paints are great for representing dirt, grime, oils, slime etc. The very nature of the paint is such that it mimics these effects very well. Oil paints are also easier to blend as they have a much longer drying time than acrylic paint. In The Painting Guide that I've found online, Debra Clem states an interesting fact about oil paint, which I was not aware of. 

Oil paints cannot be mixed with water or water based paints, including acrylics. Some artists, however, layer oil paints on top of dry acrylic paint. Acrylics cannot, however, be used on top of oil paints because they will not properly bind to the oil surface.

This subtopic in this guide discusses many different types of oil paints like poppy oil, cold-pressed safflower oil, stand oil, linseed oil, and sun-thickened oil. Clem goes into depth of each type of oil and their effects on the artist's canvass.

Oil Painting

Artist: Claude Monet

Acrylic

Acrylic paints, according to Stephanie Pui-Mun Law, are water based, and though they may not smell as much as oil paints, there are no messy solvents. During further research on this medium, "Acrylic paint is divided into different grades." states the Acrylic Paint Review. These different grades are:

• Professional Artist Paint- contains a high amount of pigment  without  fillers that dilute the intensity of the color.
• Student Grade Paint- contains less pure pigment and fillers are added to extend the paint in order to offer more volume of paint for a lesser price.
• Acrylic Craft Paint- best used straight from the bottle as mixing colors with craft paint can be unpredictable. (Often used by decorative painters)
• Acrylic Scholastic Paint- intended for elementary or high school students.

Acrylic Painting
Artist: Brian Simmons


Watercolor

Another form of paint in the art world is the water color paint. Wikipedia defines watercolor color paint as  the medium or the resulting artwork in which the paints are made of pigments suspended in a water-soluble vehicle. The advantages of watercolor lie in the ease and quickness of its application, in the transparent effects it gives off, and in the brilliance of its colors. Water color can make beautiful abstract artwork as well as fascinating landscape pieces. Dawn McLeod Hiem gives us an inside scoop on different techniques to use with water colors which are:

• Controlled Wash
• Charging Colors
• Softening Edges
• Lifting, Scrubbing, Blotting
• Dry brush, Wet-Into-Wet, Salt
• Sponge, Graded-Wash, Splatter

Hiem states, "Water techniques are the methods we use to bring shape and form to our painting, while at the same time allowing us to express our creativity."

"Dead" by Khadija Azzam

   This is one of my paintings I did about a year ago. I called the painting "Dead" because of the poem I wrote onto the painting. I used acrylic paint as the first coat of the painting. I first layered it with blue paint, then continuously piled more paint with other shades of blue and cool colors. My favorite techniques that I used when painting this was the splatter effect. This was done with watercolor and I used this effects to give the tree a look where the leaves on the branches in the background look faded. This painting won a blue ribbon in the Prince William County Art Show and is one of my favorite pieces of all time.