What Is Medium in Art? 7 Examples

Discover the meaning of medium in art and how artists use different materials and tools to express their creative vision.

Not in this block of text, though! You will have to scroll using your little mouse to find the definition below this image. That way we keep it interactive. I feel the dopamine rush already! Do you feel it?

A medium in the art sphere is the term for the material used to create artwork. Mediums can include paint or inks, sculpting materials, fabric, glass, and even sound or living people in some cases. That is a weird way to describe "theatre"..! But we all know that this is referring to Marina Abramović's type of work, which would be the only reason to specify that the medium of artistic expression used is not "dead" people, this time at least!

1. Painting:

I don't need to define what painting is, right? I'm not about to help you write your middle school level essay! You thought you could trick me into doing homework, I'm an adult now, I don't need to do that! I instead write articles... Well, maybe it's not that different after all...!

Okey, there you have it! I don't promise you a good grade, though: Painting is a visual art, which is characterized by the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface. The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, airbrushes and even "living" people!

A. Oil

Oil painting is the process of painting with pigments with a medium of drying oil as the binder. Okey, let's move on from the strict definitions! What if I told you that the oldest known oil paintings were created by Buddhist artists in Afghanistan and date back to the 7th century AD. And I know what you might be thinking: No, this is not propaganda from the theocratic leadership of Afghanistan!

Now the practical information: The advantages of oil for painting images include "greater flexibility, richer and denser color, the use of layers, and a wider range from light to dark". But the process is slower, especially when one layer of paint needs to be allowed to dry before another is applied.

The most famous and easily recognizable oil paintings include: Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa", Jan van Eyck's "The Arnolfini Portrait", Klimt's "The Kiss" and even Kandinsky's "Composition VII" which admittedly, might be harder to recognize than the others...!

B. Watercolor

This painting method which utilizes paints made of pigments suspended in a water-based paint, might be the most ancient form of art itself. Dating back to the Stone Age when prehistoric man mixed earth and charcoal with water and painted the very first wet-on-dry artwork on a cave wall. What do I really mean by "mixed earth"? We all know how dirty our cave man were (and are...)!

In East Asia, watercolor painting with inks is referred to as brush painting or scroll painting. In Chinese, Korean and Japanese painting it has been the dominant medium, often in monochrome black or browns, often using "inkstick".

Unfortunately there are not so many famous watercolor paintings to list. It might have to do with how it ages poorly compared with oil paint. It's official! Oil won, everyone! Let the watercolor losers sob. They might find use in their tears if they mix them properly with pigment, am I right...!? (the painting below is called Watercolor Tears for a reason...!)

C. Acrylic

Acrylic paint contains a plasticized material, quick-drying paint, in which the pigments are contained in an emulsion of an acrylic polymer. I'm not going to explain to you what a polymer is, now... But I definitely could, mind you!

Although they are soluble in water, once they dry they are resistant to it. Beware, when it dries the tone changes slightly, more than in oil paint. Acrylic painting dates back to the first half of the 20th century, and was developed in parallel in Italy and the United States. We've come so far: in prehistoric times we mixed charcoal with DIY "fertilizer" to create paint and now I don't even know what synthetic drugs people are mixing to paint!

2. Wood

Until canvas became the more popular support medium in the 16th century, panel painting (painting made on a flat panel of wood) was the normal method, when not painting directly onto a wall (fresco) or on vellum (used for miniatures in illuminated manuscripts).

We are covering a very prestigious medium in Ancient Greece and Rome, but only very few examples of panel paintings from that time have survived. A series of 6th century BC painted tablets from Pitsa (Greece... of course, not Pitsa, Kentucky!) represent the oldest surviving Greek panel paintings. I could save you some time stating that they are in very poor conditions and surviving fragments aren't even that good... We might need to wait a century or two to find really astounding pieces but mostly sculptures... Non made from wood, of course...! What was I writing about?

The Garden of Earthly Delights by the Early Netherlandish master Hieronymus Bosch is an oil painting on a wood panel, concretely oak wood. In case you were looking to make an oak table or chair and needed some extra wood, the painting is currently housed in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, Spain since 1939. You could also wonder at its beauty! But you might need to sit down at some point, right?

The picture below will help you understand what wood is, since we are unfortunately lacking a proper definition in this article:

3. Drawing

You were drawing caricatures of your favorite infamous teacher in high school (or at least I was) so you know what we will be covering next:

A. Charcoal

This dry art medium includes compressed charcoal and charcoal sticks indistinctly. The marks it leaves behind on paper are much less permanent that with other media such as graphite, and so lines can easily be erased and blended. Charcoal works well on smooth and coarse surfaces. When your drawing is done fixatives will help you to prevent erasing or rubbing off of charcoal dusts.

Hatching, Rubbing, Blending and Lifting might seem like foreign concepts to you (and me) so I will let Tianyin Wang (@tianyin1230) explain this one with his Domestika course on "Expressive Charcoal Drawing". Thanks you Tianyin for relieving me from describing too many words on this article...! I found a nice shortcut...!

In his course you will learn how to do much more than what's shown in the image below, I promise!

B. Pencil

Pencil drawings were not known before the 17th century, with the modern concept of pencil drawings taking shape in the 18th and 19th centuries. Pencil drawings succeeded the older metalpoint drawing stylus, which used metal instead of graphite.

And of course Domestika has a ton of courses on pencil drawing, It arguably the basis of modern art making. Modern artists continue to use the graphite pencil for artworks and sketches.

C. Ink

A gel, sol, or solution that contains at least one colorant, such as a dye or pigment, and is used to color a surface to produce an image, text, or design is what we call "Ink". It is used for drawing with the assistance of a pen, brush, reed pen, or quill.

Ink can be a complex medium, composed of solvents, pigments, dyes, resins, lubricants, solubilizers, surfactants, particulate matter, fluorescents, and other materials. To me all synthetic drugs... But I'm not alone, most art students can testify to that. The components of inks serve many purposes; the ink's carrier, colorants, other additives affect the flow and thickness of the ink and its dry appearance and finally some give me vibrant visions... I really shouldn't make drug use jokes on here, some middle schooler might be copy and pasting this article and turning it in as their homework...! Well, I hope you have a groovy teacher!

This is all we are covering today! But of course there are more mediums... For some in the distant past you might need to call a Physical Medium but for current ones like digital art or mixed media some Domestika courses could be useful:

- Join our Watercolor painting courses
- Or perhaps you might fancy our Digital Painting Courses
- Or Leonor Pérez's Course on Mixed Media Techniques
- What is Pop Art? An Article by Nathan Ams