Painting Media
Five traditional media, and how they actually behave on a surface — pick one to compare. Runs in your browser — no server call, no tracking.
Tempera — The Ancient Standard
Bound with egg yolk, tempera was the dominant panel-painting medium from ancient Egypt through the medieval and early Renaissance periods. It dries almost instantly into a hard, durable film — which is exactly why it demands fine, careful hatching strokes rather than broad blending.
Oil — Perfected by van Eyck
Oil paint existed in cruder forms earlier, but early-15th-century Flemish painter Jan van Eyck is widely credited with refining oil glazing techniques into the luminous, slow-blending medium that would dominate Western painting for the next 500 years.
Watercolor — From Ink Wash to Turner
Watercolor's roots run deep in East Asian ink wash painting traditions. In the West, it was elevated from a sketching tool to a serious fine-art medium largely through English landscape painters, above all J.M.W. Turner in the early 19th century.
Acrylic — The Synthetic Newcomer
The youngest major medium by far. Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros experimented with industrial synthetic paints in the 1930s; the first commercial artist acrylics reached the market in the late 1940s. Its fast-drying, water-based flexibility made it the medium of choice for Pop artists like Andy Warhol.