Pigments

A pigment can be made from very different materials: ground minerals, dyestuffs from nature or the laboratory, and other compounds made by people. What sets a pigment apart from a dye is that a dye dissolves in the liquid it colours, while a pigment does not; it stays in the liquid as tiny solid particles. Paint is pigment bound together by a medium, such as egg tempera, watercolour, oil or glue size. The proportion of pigment to medium changes how workable the paint is, what colour it gives and how long it takes to dry. Pigments also vary in how quickly they deteriorate over the years, and in what form the damage takes. Mineral pigments are made by grinding ore found in nature; ochre, azurite, cinnabar and malachite are among the examples listed in the Getty vocabulary. In Japanese, iwa-enogu (岩絵具) are paints made from natural minerals that have been ground fine, refined and dried. They do not dissolve in water, so they are mixed with nikawa (glue), and the finer the grain, the paler the colour. They are used in East Asian painting. Korean colour painting and Japan's nihonga each have a card on how they use mineral pigments.

Find a thickly laid area and a thinly laid area of the same colour, and compare how the colour looks in each.