Paint

Paint is the general term for a family of products used to protect and add color to an object or surface by covering it with a pigmented coating. As a verb, painting is the application of paint. One who paints is called a painter.

Paint is very common and is applied to almost every kind of object. It is a method of producing art, an industrial coating, a driving aid (lane markings), a preservative (to prevent corrosion or water damage), and has a myriad of other uses.

With art, it has also been used for centuries in the creation of great works, such as Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa and Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night.

Art

There is a wide variety of artists' paints available for the professional or amateur artist.Since the time of the Renaissance, siccative (drying) oil paints, primarily linseed oil, have been the most commonly used kind of paints in fine art applications; oil paint is still common today. However, in the 20th century, water-based paints, including watercolors and acrylic paints, became very popular with the development of latex and acrylic pigment suspensions. Milk paints (also called casein), where the medium is derived from milk, were popular in the 19th century and are still available today.

Egg tempera (where the medium is an emulsion of egg yolk mixed with oil) is still in use as well, as are encaustic wax-based paints. Gouache is a variety of watercolor paint which was also used in the Middle Ages and Renaissance for manuscript illumination. The pigment was often made from ground semiprecious stones such as lapis lazuli and the binder made from either gum arabic or egg white. Gouache is commercially available today.Poster paint has been used primarily in the creation of student works, or by children.