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Prints and printmaking Australia Asia Pacific provides a gateway for information on printed images from Australia and the Asia Pacific region.

The focus of the site is prints and printmaking by artists from Australia, Aboriginal Australia, the Torres Strait Islands, Papua New Guinea, Maori and Pakeha Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific region including , New Caledonia, Nuie, Samoa, Kiribati, and the Solomon Islands. The site also includes references to prints and printmaking in China, India, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam.

Based on the Australian print collection at the National Gallery of Australia there is free online access to over 22,000 images. The databases can be searched by artist, subject or print techniques such as etching, woodcut, wood-engraving, linocut, lithograph, screenprint, monotype and other print related processes such as posters and artists books. Index to online information on printmakers, print workshops, print publishers, print galleries and public and private collections.

Watercolor is a one of the painting method. A watercolor is the average or the resulting artwork, in which the paints are prepare of pigments dangled in a water soluble vehicle. The conventional and most general support for watercolor paintings is paper; other supports contain papyrus, bark papers, plastics, leather, fabric, wood, and canvas. In East Asia, watercolor painting among inks is referred to as brush painting or scroll painting. In Chinese & Japanese painting it has been the leading average, often in monochrome black or browns. India, Ethiopia and other countries also have long society. Finger painting with watercolor paints created in China.

New carriers for paint were developed beyond organic polymer technology in the 20th century. In several cases, for example acrylic paint, a different binder is substituted for oil. These fresh binders have dissimilar properties than oil paint, such as faster drying times and raised mechanical strength of the paint film. They require different techniques and give new possibilities that are not available to oil painters, such as the building of heavy surface and impasto, the use of collage, and the sculpting of the paint surface. Contemporary thinking therefore recognizes the new materials as separate mediums.

Some manufacturers, in an attempt to produce a medium that is oil-based but avoids toxic cleaners and thinners, have handled to produce water miscible oil paints. The vehicle for such paints is an oil with a surfactant particle chemically bonded to it which allows oil to mix with water in much the same way dish soap does, but with greater sophistication.

In the mid-1400s, Venice was the most powerful city in Italy, made rich by nearly a thousand years of commerce, mostly in goods from the East. Its navy ruled the Mediterranean as if it were a Venetian lake. By the end of the fifteenth century, however, the city's fortunes had begun to change. Venice lost both territory and trade after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Later, Portuguese naval exploration around the tip of Africa drew still more traffic away from Venetian-controlled overland routes. Increasingly the city's future lay with the West. Despite the renown of its ambassadors and spies, however, Venice's position weakened.

Venice nevertheless maintained its prestige and legendary splendor. Venetian artists first established an international reputation during these years. Grounding their art in the senses, they appealed to the eye -- and the spirit -- through brilliant color, glowing light, and the beauties of nature. Long ties with Byzantium had left a lingering preference for gold mosaics and iconlike images of the Virgin, but by the 1470s Venetian painters had absorbed the renaissance innovations of Florence and central Italy. Through the city's preeminence in the oriental trade for spices and luxury goods, Venice's artists had always enjoyed access to the finest and most costly pigments. Greater contact with northern Europe now introduced them to the new technology of oil painting, which had recently been perfected in the Low Countries.