ABSTRACT
This chapter describes painting and its qualities, functions, and meanings in society. It aims to identify best practices for teaching painting and create instructional resources for teaching painting. The physical act of painting becomes a gateway to become acquainted with artists’ thought processes and feelings about subject matter. Many contemporary artists move through electronic media sources that they may reproduce, combine, and alter before arriving to finished paintings. Watercolors are well-suited for indoor and outdoor painting, as well as creating works that feature reflective lights and transparent layered textures. Modern finger painting came to life in the 1920s after a teacher named Ruth Faison Shaw saw one of her students gleefully smear iodine on the bathroom wall after getting cut. Acrylic paint is a permanent paint medium comprised of pigment and a polymer binder. Encaustic painting spread from ship decorations to waxed artworks on pieces of wood and even patina on three-dimensional works.
