Painting and colour media: watercolour, acrylic, gouache, oil pastel and ink; paint handling, grounds, layering, glazing and wet and dry techniques.

What this dot point is asking

Painting and colour media are core to most Art and Design titles, and handling them well is strong AO2 evidence. Edexcel asks you to experiment with and select appropriate media, materials, techniques and processes, so knowing what each paint medium does, and how to handle it, lets you make informed choices. This page covers the main painting media, paint handling, grounds, and wet and dry techniques.

The main painting media

Each medium has a character that suits different subjects and effects.

Paint handling

How you control the paint matters as much as which paint you use.

Wet and dry techniques

A range of techniques gives variety and is reviewable AO2 evidence.

Why painting rewards control and experimentation

It is tempting to judge painting purely on the finished image, but Edexcel marks the experimentation and selection behind it, so the way you explore and handle paint is itself evidence. The commonest weakness is using paint with no control (unthinned, all one consistency, layers mixing wet into mud), which gives flat, muddy results however good the drawing underneath. Learning to control consistency, layering and drying transforms the work, and the practice trials are reviewable AO2 experiments. Mixing colour from a limited palette (rather than many tube colours) gives harmony and teaches how colour behaves, linking this to the colour formal element. The ground matters too: a toned or coloured ground changes how every colour reads and can unify a painting, and textured grounds suit broken, expressive handling. Painters are studied for handling constantly: the Impressionists for broken colour and visible brushwork capturing light, Vincent van Gogh for thick directional impasto, J. M. W. Turner for luminous watercolour washes, and David Hockney for bold flat acrylic. Analysing how a painter handles their medium, then testing the technique in your own samples, links AO1 research to AO2 experiments and an AO4 outcome, and proves you can select media to realise your intentions.

Try this

Q1. Name two differences between watercolour and acrylic. [Knowledge recall]

• Cue. Watercolour is transparent and worked light to dark; acrylic is opaque, fast-drying and can be layered dark to light and overpainted (any two valid differences).

Q2. Explain why letting acrylic layers dry before overpainting avoids muddy results. [Short explanation]

• Cue. Acrylic dries permanently, so a dry layer is not disturbed by the next; if you paint into a still-wet layer the colours mix on the surface and dull each other into mud, whereas dried layers keep each colour clean and let you build depth.