Different Types of Art Mediums and How to Use Them

A medium is the material a work of art is made of. Artists use different art mediums based on their style of drawing or painting. Some mediums are better suited for some artists than others. In order to pick the medium you feel most comfortable with, you should learn about the most popular art mediums. Here are the most popular art mediums for drawing and painting:

Oil Paint

Oil paints are one of the oldest painting mediums. They are very popular and have been used in paintings like the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci and The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh. They dry very slowly, taking up to days or even weeks to fully dry, but this means that artists can blend colors and change their drawings very easily.

Watercolor Paint

Watercolor paint is most often used for landscape drawings due to being able to add up colors slowly layer by layer. This is possible because the amount of water added to the watercolor changes its transparency (Hence its name, watercolors !). Watercolor can be hard to use due to it giving no room for mistakes, but if you work from light to dark, there shouldn’t be a problem.

Acrylic Paint

Acrylic paint is one of the most popular painting mediums and used often because of the its ease of use and price being not as expensive compared to other mediums like oil paint and watercolor paint. Acrylic paint can be used in many surfaces like glass, metal, paper, plastic, wood etc. Acrylic paint is useful if you want to create texture by applying multiple layers of paint or even make your painting 3D!

Gouache

Gouache is basically the combination of acrylic and watercolor paint. It dries fast and is opaque like acrylic paint but is also water-based like watercolor which means that they can be activated again after drying with a little bit of water. Be careful when layering with gouache because any new layer of paint will activate the layers below, which will make the colors darker.

Soft Pastels

Pastels are a dry medium, which means that they don’t need time to dry. They smudge very easily, but this is also an advantage if you want to blend your colors! Even though pastels are often associated with childish drawings, they can be used to make beautiful pieces of art too. There are also oil pastels which are more like oil paints, they take longer to dry and are very different from soft pastels in texture.

Colored Pencils

Colored pencils are medium that everyone of use has probably used but never reached its full potential. Although great at blending, its takes time and effort to first layer your colors and then press hard to bring it altogether. It’s also a very accessible medium as it’s sold almost everywhere.

Markers

Markers are a very vibrant and versatile medium because of the vast variety of different marker types like acrylic markers which work more like acrylic paint, the felt-tip marker which is the marker most people think of when they hear markers, and alcohol markers which are like felt tip markers but they blend extremely well, bleed through pages a lot and have a unique smell. 

Inks

Inks are very unforgiving and hard to use compared to other mediums because of the fact it can’t be erased. The emphasis of inks is on the smoothness and flow of the lines, so they are more simplistic and minimal.  

Digital Art

Digital art can imitate other art mediums while having its own benefits like being able to undo mistakes with just a click and separating your piece into layers to be able to modify one without affecting the other. Different apps have different layouts and brushes which makes it harder to switch programs.

Mixed Media

Mixed media isn’t just one medium, it is the combination of multiple mediums. For example, you might want to add a white dot to my drawing made of colored pencils but you have already colored in everything. You could get some acrylic paint or acrylic markers to paint those white dots. Mixed media allows artists to have the best of both worlds and use their creativity to the max.

I hope you have learned something from this and hopefully you have an idea which art medium suits you and your style the best!