A Guide to Art Mediums

You've fallen in love with a painting. But what does "oil on canvas" actually mean, and how is it different from "gouache on paper"? If you've ever found yourself unsure, you're not alone — and it matters more than you might think.

What the Medium Tells You

A medium description names two things: the material the artist painted with, and the surface they painted on. Paint first, surface second — so "oil on linen" is oil paint on a linen canvas.

Between them they tell you how the work will look in your room, how it should be framed, and how to look after it. They are also the artist's first decision, made long before the first mark.

The Paint

Oil

Pigment bound in a drying oil, usually linseed. Oil dries by oxidation rather than evaporation — slowly, over days at the surface and years underneath. That slowness is the whole point: it lets an artist blend wet into wet, and build glazes, thin transparent layers that light passes through and bounces back out of. It is why an oil painting has a depth that a photograph of it never quite carries.

Oil is the most prestigious medium in Western art history and, for several centuries, its dominant one. Much of what hangs in a museum today is oil. Cared for reasonably, it lasts centuries.

Acrylic

Pigment suspended in an acrylic polymer emulsion — water-based, and taken up widely by artists from the middle of the twentieth century. It dries by evaporation, in minutes rather than weeks, which rewards a different way of working: crisp edges, layers stacked quickly, decisions that stay made.

The dried film stays slightly flexible, so acrylic resists the fine cracking that oil can develop with age. Colours often dry a touch deeper than they look when wet — something the artist has already accounted for.

Watercolour

Finely ground pigment in a water-soluble binder, usually gum arabic, on paper. Watercolour is transparent, which means the paper does the illuminating: the light you see comes from the white beneath the pigment, not from white paint. Highlights are the areas the artist chose not to touch — they have to be planned from the first stroke and protected to the last.

Corrections are limited, which is why a watercolour that looks effortless rarely was. Many watercolour pigments are sensitive to light, so a work like this belongs behind UV-filtering glazing and away from direct sun.

Gouache

Watercolour's opaque relative — the same water-based binder, but more pigment and an added white filler, so it sits on top of the paper as a flat, matte, fully saturated layer instead of letting the surface show through.

That flatness is exactly what Persian miniature painting and Mughal court painting were built on, traditions that run directly into a great deal of Middle Eastern painting made today. If you are drawn to work with strong pattern, clear outlines and dense colour, gouache is often what you are responding to. It shares watercolour's sensitivity to light.

Ink

Applied with reed, pen or brush. Carbon-based inks — soot suspended in a binder — are among the most stable colourants there are, which is part of why calligraphic and manuscript traditions have survived as well as they have.

Ink is the medium of Arabic calligraphy, where the quality of the line — its weight, its speed, its confidence — is the work itself rather than a means to it.

Gilt

Gold applied to the surface, either as leaf or as a gold-toned paint. Gold has been used in Islamic manuscript illumination and Persian painting for centuries, most often alongside ink and gouache.

One practical thing worth knowing: gilding is directional. It can read as flat ochre from one angle and blaze from another, so a gilded work changes through the day. Hang it where daylight moves across it rather than flat against it, and it will never look the same twice.

Pastel

Not a liquid at all — pure pigment with just enough binder to hold a stick together, drawn straight onto paper. Because so little binder stands between you and the pigment, pastel colour is unusually direct, soft and luminous.

It is also the most fragile thing you can hang on a wall: the colour sits as loose particles caught in the texture of the paper. Never touch the surface, and frame it under glass promptly, with a mount or spacer so the glazing never rests against the work.

Charcoal

Carbonised wood, capable of everything from a grey whisper to the densest black available to a draughtsman. Like pastel it is friable, usually stabilised with a spray fixative and best framed under glass. It is often thought of as a preparatory medium, but plenty of artists resolve finished works in it — and a charcoal drawing carries an immediacy that paint can lose.

Mixed Media

More than one material in a single work — oil and charcoal, ink and gouache, acrylic and gilt. Often the most inventive pieces in a collection. For care, treat a mixed media work according to its most delicate component: anything containing pastel or charcoal is handled as a pastel.

The Surface

Canvas

Woven fabric, usually cotton, stretched over a wooden frame. It has a slight give under the brush and a visible weave that stays part of the finished surface, and it is light for its size. Canvas responds to the room around it — the fabric slackens and tightens as humidity changes, which is normal and reversible.

Linen

Woven from flax rather than cotton. The weave is finer and more even, the fibre stronger, and the cloth more dimensionally stable — it moves less. It has long been the traditional choice for work intended to last, and it costs more accordingly.

Board

A rigid panel — wood, or a compressed board. It does not flex, so fine detail stays exactly where the artist put it, and it will not slacken with the weather. Heavier than canvas at the same size, and often chosen for smaller, more concentrated pieces.

Paper

Historically the central support of the region — manuscripts, miniatures, calligraphy. Quality does a great deal of work here: heavyweight, acid-free paper resists yellowing and takes wet media without buckling. Works on paper are also the most sensitive things you can own, to both light and damp, and the ones that most reward good framing.

How to Read a Listing

A line like Oil on Canvas, 100 × 120 cm tells you more than it looks:

  • Oil on Canvas — paint first, surface second, always
  • 100 × 120 cm — height before width, and unframed. Allow several centimetres each way if you intend to frame with a mount

Every listing states its medium and support. What else we require from an artist before a work goes live is set out in Our Curation Standards.

What's Normal in a Handmade Work

If you are used to printed images, a painting in the hand can surprise you the first time. These are characteristics, not faults:

  • Visible brushwork — ridges, direction, the thickness of loaded paint
  • The weave of the canvas reading through thinner passages
  • An irregular deckled edge on handmade paper
  • Slight cockling in a watercolour where the paper took up water — this generally relaxes once the work is mounted and framed
  • Fine, stable craquelure in an older oil painting — the paint film hardening and moving with its support over decades, a mark of age rather than damage
  • Colour that isn't quite what your screen showed you — no screen renders pigment exactly

Flaking or lifting paint, tears, water staining and mould are a different matter entirely, and none of it should ever reach you. How we handle it if it does is covered in Ordering, Delivery & Returns.

Living With Your Artwork

Light

Keep every medium out of direct sunlight — there is no exception to this one. Works on paper are the most vulnerable, and watercolour, gouache and pastel most of all. UV-filtering glazing is worth the modest extra cost at the framer.

Humidity

Steady matters more than exact. Avoid bathrooms and kitchens, cold exterior walls, and the wall directly above a radiator or fireplace. Rapid swings between damp and dry are what stress a canvas or a sheet of paper, far more than any settled level.

Framing

Every work arrives unframed, which leaves the decision where it belongs — with you and the room it is going into.

Anything on paper should be mounted and glazed by a framer, with the mount holding the glass off the surface. Oil and acrylic on stretched canvas can hang perfectly well unframed, or in a float frame that leaves a shadow gap around the edge. For pastel and charcoal, go to a professional, and go soon.

Questions About a Piece?

If you want to know how a particular work is made, how it will sit in your space, or how best to frame it once it arrives, ask us. We would far rather you bought the right piece than simply a piece.