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| Lets cover a little history of paints and their use. It is generally accepted that the first known paintings are some 15,000 years old and are preserved in the caves of Altamira in Spain and Lascaux in France, although some experts date these at 20,000+ BC. |
| The Egyptians painted the Pharaoh's tombs around 1500 BC importing pigments from as far away as India. Around this time paint making as an art became quite widely established in Crete and Greece with the Egyptians passing their skills to the Romans. However the fall of the Roman Empire around 400AD led to paint making becoming a lost art until the English re-learnt the techniques in the Middle Ages. Initially this was to decorate their churches and then in the houses of wealthy noblemen and aristocrats. |
| At about the same time, Italian craftsmen developed their own paint making skills in a highly secret fashion. Confidentiality was so tight that often the knowledge of the process was not passed to successors and died out with each generation. |
| Commercial manufacture commenced in Europe and the United States of America in the 1700s being a highly manual operation. In the 1800s mechanisation started and in the last century major advancements in paint chemistry and paint technology caused the available range to mushroom. |
| The materials used in the pre-history paintings are the earth colours, chalk, bone and burnt wood. The paintings are extremely delicate, irreplaceable and consequently not open to the general viewing as the modern environment of strong light, cigarette smoke and man made pollutants would quickly destroy these fragile works. However as these cave drawings were produced by the use of colour applied directly to the cave walls while the results were paintings, the media used was not strictly paint. Possibly by accident, paints were only produced when the colours or pigments were mixed with a second material thus producing a material that could be more readily applied. This material is currently called a medium but those thousands of years ago would have been egg white / albumen or blood. |
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