Five Fun Facts About Paint

Did you know that the Greek Philosopher Plato is credited with the discovery that mixing two different paint colors together will create a third, new color? Or that the first interior painting was a cave drawing done roughly 40,000 years ago in France?

To remind everyone about our upcoming Golden Lecture and Demo we’ve rounded up five fun facts about paint:

In 2004, the Chilean artist Marco Evaristti used three fire hoses and 3,000 liters of pigment to paint the tip of an iceberg in Greenland bright red. Read about it here on NBC News.

As they say, necessity is the mother of all invention! Francis Davis Millet is credited with the invention of spray paint while working under tight deadlines to complete construction for The Chicago World’s Fair.

At one time, the most expensive pigment was ultra-marine. It was made from a lapis lazuli, which you might find in an ancient illuminated manuscript, which were created using paints made from a mixture of crushed precious stones and a binding agent.

Oil paints don’t dry. Instead they harden due to oxidation, usually in about two weeks, and are ready to be varnished in roughly six months. However, sometimes it takes years for an oil painting to fully harden!

The earliest known oil paintings were Buddhist murals found in Afghanistan’s Bamiyan caves. They date back to the 7^th century CE. Read about it here on CNN.

Bonus Fact! (Not about paint, but still pretty cool)

Remember the colorwheel? It’s older than the United States. Sir Isaac Newton (ahem, genius) created it in 1706. According to the History of Color, he “took bar of colors created by the passage of light through a prism and transformed it into a segmented circle, where the size of each segment differed according to his calculations of its wavelength and of its corresponding width in the spectrum.”

Ok, if you thought this was fun, then you’re gonna love the free Golden Lecture and Demo taking place during AAC’s December First Thursday on Dec 4 from 6:30 to 8:30pm. The session will cover a broad range of Golden Acrylics products, as well as information on Williamsburg Oils and QoR Watercolors. Learn about pigment properties and paint formulations, gels, pastes, grounds, color mixing, drying time, health and safety concerns, and more!

Come, join us at this free lecture and demo to learn more about paint and the different ways it can be used! The best part – you’ll get a palette-full of knowledge and a bag of fun samples so you can try these techniques at home!