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Acrylic: fast-drying paint containing pigment suspended in an acrylic polymer emulsion. Acrylic paints can be diluted with water or modified with acrylic gels, mediums, or pastes, the finished acrylic painting can resemble a watercolor or an oil painting, or have its own unique characteristics not attainable with other media.





Airbrush: small, air-operated tool that sprays various media including ink and dye, but most often paint by a process of nebulization. Spray guns developed from the airbrush and are still considered a type of airbrush.





Allegory: an expression by means of symbolic figures, actions or symbolic representation found in realistic painting, sculpture or some other form of mimetic, or representative art.





Altarpiece: a picture or relief representing a religious subject and suspended in a frame behind the altar of a church that usually spans a series of panels. The panels are called diptych, triptych or polyptych, depending on their order and the number of panels used.





Avant-garde: refers to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics and is thought to be a pushing of the boundaries of what is accepted as the norm or the status quo.






Bodegón: a painting usually depicting a still life scene of food, drink, or killed game (usually hacked up) that got its start in the Baroque period (17th century). This style was very popular with Spanish (from Spain), Flemish, and the regions of the Netherlands. The paintings tend to be very dark in lighting with very dark hues used for the subject.





Body Painting (bodypainting): the art of painting a on the body. Large scale or full-body painting is more commonly referred to as body painting, while smaller or more detailed work is generally referred to as temporary tattoos, as with Mehndi (henna) artists. Unlike tattoos and other forms of body art, body painting is temporary and lasts for several hours, or at most a couple of weeks.



Botanical: depicting one or several species of plants or flowers or trees as the main subject of the painting.



Broken Color: one of the cornerstones in Impressionist painting, the broken color technique creates a sense of light by applying one or more colors of paint on the media in broken layers and uses no blending techniques.





Cartoon: from the Italian "cartone" and Dutch word "karton", meaning strong, heavy paper or pasteboard, a cartoon is a full-size drawing made on sturdy paper as a modello (a preparatory study or model) for a painting, stained glass, or tapestry. Cartoons were typically used in the production of frescoes, to accurately link the component parts of the composition when painted on damp plaster over a series of days.





Chiaroscuro: (Italian meaning light-dark) the term is usually applied to bold contrasts affecting a whole composition, but is also more technically used to describe the effects representing contrasts of light (of varying degrees of strength) to achieve a sense of volume in modeling three-dimensional objects such as the human body.

Additionally, the term is used as "chiaroscuro woodcut", used for colored woodcuts printed with different blocks, each using a different colored ink, and "chiaroscuro drawing" used for drawings on colored paper with drawing in a dark medium and white highlighting. The term is now also used in describing similar effects in the lighting of cinema and photography.





Composition: composition is the placement or arrangement of visual elements or ingredients in a work of art (also called a page layout).

Aspects of composition are:





Cubism: 20th century avant-garde art movement where objects are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in an abstracted form—instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context.

The three phases of cubism are Analytic Cubism (or Early Cubism) from 1906 to 1911; Synthetic Cubism (or High Cubism), which used synthetic materials in the art from about 1911 to 1919ish; and Late Cubism from 1914 to 1921.





Drybrush: a paint brush that has been drained of excess liquid (as with watercolor or oil paints) and is relatively dry but still holds paint is used instead of a wet brush, giving the resulting brush strokes a scratchy look.





Easel Picture: a painting made while resting on an easel, as distinguished from a painting on a wall or ceiling.




Enamel Paint: a paint that air dries to a really hard, usually glossy, finish. Typically the term "enamel paint" is used to describe oil-based covering products, usually with a significant amount of gloss in them, however recently many latex or water-based paints have adopted the term as well. The term today means "hard surfaced paint" and usually is in reference to paint brands of higher quality, floor coatings of a high gloss finish, or spray paints.



Encaustic Wax: also known as hot wax painting, involves using heated beeswax to which colored pigments are added. The liquid/paste is then applied to a surface — usually prepared wood, though canvas and other materials are often used.





Figure Painting: a live model is used as the subject matter of a two-dimensional piece of artwork using paint as the medium.





Fingerpaint: paint intended to be applied with the fingers; it typically comes in pots.





Foreshortening: the visual effect or optical illusion that an object or distance appears shorter than it actually is because it is angled toward the viewer, such as with a checkerboard floor.





Four-dimensional Painting: theoretical type of painting in which painting would transcend its two-dimensionality and even the three-dimensionality of sculpture. Joan Miro and Salvador Dali are the two most famous artists of this genre.





Fresco: any of several related painting types from the Renaissance (12th through 17th centuries) and other early time periods, done on plaster on walls or ceilings.



Genre: a loose set of criteria for a category of composition with no fixed boundaries. The main category may be divided into sub-categories or sub-genres (i.e. a painting of a scene from Alice In Wonderland may be classified as art- painting; depicting classic literature, pop culture, fantasy). The hierarchy of genres is:





Gouache: (rhymes with "squash") is a type of paint consisting of pigment suspended in water. Gouache differs from watercolor in that the particles are larger, the ratio of pigment to water is much higher, and an additional, inert, white pigment such as chalk is also present. This makes gouache heavier and more opaque, with greater reflective qualities.





Halo (not the game): an optical phenomenon that appears near a very bright light source (sun, moon, stars, ice, crystals, or lights) giving a circular or pillar-shaped glow around an object or person. In art, a halo can also be used to denote a person, object, or event of special importance, particularly in religious pieces.





Highlights: using shadowing or lightening effects to give a subject a three-dimensional effect, or otherwise denote its presence. Highlights are normally used in conjunction with the light source of an image (or follow it), but do not necessarily cast a shadow or have a darkened hue.





History Painting: the painting of scenes with narrative content from classical history, religious history, and mythology, as well as depicting the historical events of the near past.





Illustration: the visualization of art that stresses subject more than form. Illustrations can follow acutely accurate forms, or be completely creative and non-traditional. Many examples are a mixture of both.





Imprimatura: (Italian meaning first layer of paint) a thin transparent colored paint layer applied over the ground and underdrawing of a piece to tone down the brilliant white layer below, and to provide a preliminary color on which to work. Imprimatura may also be loosely applied to any colored ground layer.





Industrial: a subject depicting the Industrial era, machinery or technology.



Ink: a liquid containing various pigments and/or dyes used for coloring a surface to produce an image, text, or design.





Landscape: depicts scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests. Sky is almost always included in the view, and weather usually is an element of the composition.





Licked Finish: the process of smoothing the surface quality of a painting so that the presence of the artist's hand is no longer visible.



Luminous Paint (luminescent paint): paint that exhibits luminescence.

Types of Luminous paint are:





Maulstick: a stick with a soft leather or padded head, used by painters to support the hand that holds the brush.





Metallic Paint: also called polychromatic or metal flake paint, metallics are generally used in automotive painting, but can be used in art. They usually consist of a base coat with a clear lacquer or urethane top coat for protection and extra gloss. Two rarer variations are pearlescent paint, which appears as subtly different colors depending on the angle and intensity of the light, and "flip" colors where the color changes more radically (i.e. from purple to orange) depending on the viewing angle.



Miniature (portrait): as small in size as 40 mm × 30 mm, portrait miniatures were often used as personal mementos or as jewelry or snuff box covers. They might be commissioned by soldiers or businessmen to keep an image of a loved one, or for identification purposes such as in a pre-arranged marriage where a bride or groom might have to travel long distances without first meeting their soon-to-be spouse.





Minimalism: sometimes referred to as literalist art and ABC Art, minimalism was a reaction against the painterly forms of Abstract Expressionism as well as the discourse, institutions and ideologies that supported it and feature works to exclude the pictorial, illusionistic and fictive in favor of the literal.





Modernism (and Post-Modernism): late nineteenth and early twentieth century in Western society where many artists and people felt the "traditional" forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life were becoming outdated in the new economic, social and political conditions of an emerging fully industrialized world.

Post Modernism literally means "after the modernist movement" and is used to describe an aesthetic, literary, political or social philosophy state of being or thought. The Compact Oxford English Dictionary refers to postmodernism as "a style and concept in the arts characterized by distrust of theories and ideologies and by the drawing of attention to conventions."




Mural Painting: any piece of artwork on a wall, ceiling, or other large permanent surface.





Oil Painting, Water Miscible Oil Paint : the process of painting with pigments that are bound with a medium of drying oil commonly made from linseed oil, though poppyseed, walnut, and safflower oil are often used also.

Water miscible oil paint (also called water soluble or water-mixable) is a modern variety of oil paint which is engineered to be thinned and cleaned up with water, rather than having to use chemicals such as turpentine. It can be mixed and applied using the same techniques as traditional oil-based paint, but while still wet it can be effectively removed from brushes, palettes, and rags with ordinary soap and water





Paint, Painter: any liquid, liquifiable, or mastic composition which after application to a substrate in a thin layer is converted to an opaque solid film or an artist who uses paint as their medium or a person who paints objects for a living.




Pastel: is crayon like stick consisting of pure powdered pigment and a binder. The pigments used in pastels are the same as those used to produce all colored art media, including oil paints. Also called dry pastel.





Primer Paint: a preparatory coating put on materials before painting. Priming ensures better adhesion of paint to the surface, increases paint durability, and provides additional protection for the material being painted.





Spray Painting: a painting technique where a device sprays a coating (paint, ink, varnish etc.) through the air onto a surface. The most common types employ compressed gas — usually air compressed by an air compressor — to atomize and direct the paint particles.





Tempera: is paint made by binding pigment in an egg yolk medium sometimes along with other materials such as honey, water, milk (in the form of casein) and a variety of plant gums. Tempera is normally applied in thin, semi-opaque or transparent layers. When dry, it produces a smooth matte finish. Because it cannot be applied in thick layers as oil paints can, tempera paintings rarely have the deep color saturation that oil paintings can achieve. On the other hand, tempera colors do not change over time, whereas oil paints darken, yellow, and become transparent with age.

The techniques of tempera painting can be more precise when used with traditional techniques that require the application of numerous small brush strokes applied in a cross-hatching technique. The colors, which are painted over each other, resemble a pastel when unvarnished, and are deeper colors when varnished.





Watercolor: the medium or the resulting artwork, in which the paints are made of pigments suspended in a water soluble vehicle. The traditional and most common support for watercolor paintings is paper; other supports include papyrus, bark papers, plastics, vellum or leather, fabric, wood, and canvas. In East Asia, watercolor painting with inks is referred to as brush painting or scroll painting.