A studio background. Backdrops are frequently made from long rolls of seamless paper, draped fabric. Many backdrops can be made inexpensively by purchasing a 12' x 12' piece of floor linoleum. Place the underside on the top of the floor and paint a background using latex house paint. After letting this dry for 24 hours, roll the linoleum up with the painted side facing the outside. Hang the roll in your studio and roll it down when you need a background for a studio setting.

The back focus distance is the distancebetween the rearmost lens element and the focal plane (ie: the surface of the film or image sensor). It is usually expressed in millimetres. Back focus can be a critical issue if you’re using a lens adapter to put a lens intended for a different lens mount design on an incompatible camera. If you have a lens with a short back focus distance on a camera with a longer back focus distance, you may not be able to achieve infinity focus.

The official term is Contrejour literally means "against the daylight". The light source is situated behind the subject, tending to throw the subject into silhouette creating extreme contrasts between the dark and light, limiting the halftones.

A style of architecture painting and sculpture that originated in Europe in the late 16th century and lasted until the 18th century. The movement succeeded Mannerism> and turned away from the straight line and reason, for curves, emotion, and unidealized naturalism.

This was a German school of architecture; design and craftsmanship founded in 1919 and closed in 1933 by the Nazis. The primary interest was for fusing art with craft into the practicalities of daily life.

The ingredient in the vehicle of a paint which adheres the pigment particles to one another and to the ground. It creates uniform consistency, solidity, and cohesion. Forms of binders are mediums, adhesives, gum arabic, and some solvents.

A form of Abstract Art, which takes living organisms as its subject matter in place of geometric objects.

A brown ink made by boiling or soaking wood soot in water. Once the liquid is filtered to remove any insoluble residues, the result is a transparent and luminous ink. The exact tone of the ink depends upon the kind of wood that was burned. Chestnut, for example, results in a golden brown ink, while birch produces an ink that is yellowish brown. It is often indistinguishable from faded iron-gall ink.

Before the invention of metal tubes for artists' colors, leather bladders were used for storing paint. These bladders were then pricked when the paint was needed and then resealed to keep the paint fresh.

Black chalk is a composite of carbon and clay that has a natural cohesiveness allowing it to be cut and sawed into sticks that can be used to create firmly rendered lines of the utmost precision. It is also friable enough to produce large-scale drawings of great tonal breadth and range. Although it has been known since antiquity, it was little used as a graphic medium until the sixteenth century, when artists recognized chalk's ability to render delicate transitions in tone with a smooth and seamless unity.

Charles Blanc was an influential 19th century art historian and theorist. in the Ecole des Arts (School of the Arts) and committed to the Renaissance tradition in art. His work was important to many young artists including Georges Seurat. Blanc was a utopian Socialist, which may have appealed to the radical Neo-impressionists.

Pigments that run into an adjoining area or up through coats of paint. Usually an undesired effect. A fuzziness or spreading at the edges of a painted area. In graphic arts it means to extend the edge of a printed area, leaving no margin at one or more edges of a page. This is done by printing an extra 1/8 inch of image area, to be trimmed later.

An underpainting technique by which the artist roughly describes the forms and composition for a painting.

A foggy, whitish (or blue-white), dull surface effect which forms on varnished paintings.
See Removal of Bloom

The Blue Rider Group (the Neue Kunstler Vereiningung) or New Artist Association (N.K.V.) was founded by a number of avant-garde influential artists. The most important of these were the Russian born Wassily Kandinsky and the German, Franz Marc. In 1911 Kandinsky and Marc broke with the rest of the N.K.V. and in December that year held in Munich the first exhibition of Der Blaue Reiter. This was an informal association rather than a coherent group like Brücke. Other artists closely involved were Paul Klee and August Macke. In 1912 Marc and Kandinsky published a collection of essays on art with a woodcut cover by Kandinsky. This was the Almanach Der Blaue Reiter. Why the name was chosen is not entirely clear. Der Blaue Reiter was brought to an end by the First World War in which both August Macke and Franz Marc were killed.

The term is usually applied to bloom on cellulose lacquers, and more often implies a basic or internal defect than a surface condition. Also see Bloom(above)

Bouvier was a Swiss painter who, in 1827, published an influential book called the "Manuel des jeunes artistes et amateurs en peinture" (Handbook for Young Artists and Painting Amateurs), which provided vital information on artistic practice and materials in the early 19th century.

A term covering a number of techniques in which several colors are used in their pure state rather than being mixed or blended. Usually the paint quality is stiff and thick. When dragged across the surface, the layer beneath show through. This term can also refer to the Pointillist technique.

Brush styles are designated by a letter following a series number. Some basic brushes to meet your needs:
F- Flats, square edge, long bristle
B- Brights, flat, square-edged, long sable
R - Rounds, pointed bristle
L- Longs, flat, square-edge, long sable
Filberts- Flat, oval edge, long fibre

A drawing made by applying a water-soluble pigment with a fine brush. The brush can be used to create very fine, linear strokes or broad areas of wash.

Any kitsch which is painted in oil and produced for the mass market, characterized by sloppy yet facile rendition, and stereotyped, flamboyant, or sentimental treatment of subject matter, typically landscapes. They were most commonly used to refer to such work produced during the second half of the nineteenth century, but since the production of such painting has never ceased, the term might be applied to later examples as well. In the twentieth century, vast numbers of such pictures have been produced by assembly line methods. Recent examples are the works of Bob Ross (American), known for his television demonstrations, and Thomas Kinkade (American).

This is a term used in the darkroom phase of photography when a small cutout of a circle is placed over the print being made to allow more light exposure to a specific area on the print.