Facts & Tips - Drawing & Art - Wizard Crafts

Art is generally thought to be painting and drawing, although it also encompasses sculpture, graffiti, photography, films, theatre and books. Below are a few facts about art.

The first 'art' appeared about 40,000 years ago. This is found in Cantabria, Spain, in what has been named the 'El Castillo' cave. This contains stencils of hands, and disks created by blowing paint onto the wall. In France and the rest of Spain there are hundreds of caves containing wall art. This type of cave art is from approximately 30,000 years ago and contains pictures of animals such as deer, bison and horses, and stick men. The paints used were not paints as we know them, but just pigments, such as charcoal, haematite, ochre and manganese oxide.

No-one knows the purpose of these cave art drawings, but there are several theories. One is that they were a type of sympathetic magic. This is where something is drawn or thought about in order for it to occur in reality. Others think they were drawn by Shamans to represent the visions of their trance. They could also have been decorative. However, no-one knows.

Most of these latter drawings represent hunt scenes, which tends to suggest male artists. However, analysis of the hand paintings in the French and Spanish caves seems to suggest that the majority of them were of female hands. Perhaps they represented an early form of interior design.

Of course painting was not the only prehistoric art form to be used, The people of the palaeolithic and neolithic were also able to mould clay. Among the things they made were bowls and figurines, specifically the Venus figurines. These were small figures of a naked, very overweight woman, which are generally thought to be a representation of the Mother Goddess, or Earth Mother, or other combinations of the name.

A few thousand years later, and these people had learned how to smelt metal. There then appeared a variety of objects, animals, figurines, knives etc., in a variety of metals, eg brass, bronze, gold, silver etc.

Oil paints were not widely used until the early 15th century, although they had been used since the 12th century for basic decoration.

As previously stated, cave paintings were carried out using pigment at first, then with water added to become basic watercolour paints. All painting, illuminated manuscripts, Egyptian hieroglyphs, dark age portraits etc., were painted using a form of watercolour, indeed from the late medieval period, painting went through many changes. A basic run down of dates and styles is as follows:

1300 – 1602 Renaissance

1600 – 1730 Baroque

1720 – 1780 Rococo

1750 – 1830 Neoclassicism

1790 – 1880 Romanticism

1860 – 1890 Impressionism

1890 – 1914 Art Nouveau

1920 – 1930 Art Deco

1920 – 1940 Surrealism

1946 – Present Modern/Contemporary Art

We have a wide range of items in this category so please take a look.  These include:-  normal pencils of all hardnesses and some sets; coloured pencils; oil paints; acrylic paints; watercolour paints; brushes; easels; paper and canvases.  Please have a browse through this category and see if anything catches your eye.