The medium has also been an important part of the Asian art history for millennia, starting with the first examples in Chinese art around 4,000 BCE, and was very popular in Japan and Korea too. When papyrus was invented in Egypt the fourth millennium BCE, watercolors gained popularity, although because they were so fragile, many works from that time are now lost. The origins of watercolor painting can be found as further back as in the Stone Age, when cave paintings made by the Paleolithic man featured ochre and charcoal paint on walls. Experiments with luminosity and transparency, as well as the spontaneity of it all, can bring different results that would be equally mesmerizing, which is exactly the thing that makes watercolors so unique and evergreen. This variety, combined with the many ways a pigment can be created depending on how much water or color was used, provides the medium with many possibilities. In watercolor painting, the color pigments are usually applied to paper, although many artists use other supports such as plastics, fabric, papyrus, canvas, wood, vellum, and stone. Some consider other media that use water as a solvent to be part of a larger watercolor family, these being brush, pen, inks, temperas and gouaches, and even modern acrylic paints. Mostly being gum arabic, as opposed to other substances that were used in the past, these particles can be mixed with additives such as glycerin, honey, or ox gall, in order to achieve different visual qualities (plasticity and solubility, for example). By its definition, watercolor is a type of Fine Art painting in which the color pigments are part of a water-based solution. There are many artists out there who are only вЂњwatercoloristsвЂќ by calling, but a much greater number of them includes this kind of artwork-making as an addition to their multi-media oeuvre. Its popularity can perhaps be credited to the fact that it is quite simple to start creating an artwork using this technique, as all one needs is the paints and, typically, paper. One of the most beloved media in the history of art, watercolor (or watercolour, as the Brits spell it, and aquarelle, as it is called in French) is also one of the oldest methods of painting in the world.

Famous landscape artists names