Painting

📖 In short

Painting is one of the oldest and most beautiful arts. A painter puts colors on canvas, paper or wood to express ideas and feelings, or to paint the people, landscapes and things they see. Paintings delight us and tell us about the past.

🤩 Did you know?

The oldest known paintings were made on cave walls tens of thousands of years ago.
The first big exhibition of modern European art was held in America in 1913.
The Mona Lisa is one of the most famous paintings in the world.
Painters used to make their own colors from earth, plants and ground stones.

🔎 Find out more

🌟 Kinds of paint

Painters use different paints: thick oil paints that dry slowly, transparent watercolors, fast-drying acrylics, and colored pencils and wax crayons.

🔍 What do artists paint?

Some painters paint people's faces, some paint landscapes like mountains and seas, some paint fruit and flowers, and some paint shapes and colors that don't look like anything real.

💡 Art movements

Painting has changed over time and many movements have appeared: some painters wanted pictures to look exactly like photos, others painted light and dots of color, and others painted geometric shapes.

🎯 Primary colors

Red, yellow and blue are primary colors, and from them we make other colors: blue and yellow make green, red and yellow make orange, and red and blue make purple.