It might be noted that with growing need to preserve the work of art the creator would choose the best possible measure to keep his work alive. A simple sketch might stay on a paper for a long time, but it fades out on a piece of cloth. This is quite the condition for the color pigments used for painting. They fail to hold onto the paper texture for a longer time and thus seem to come of or fade out.

 

For this purpose oil painting was developed, as it provided for a longer period in comparison to the watercolor painting. Canvas can be stated to be a woven fabric, quite heavy, used mainly for the purpose of sailing. It should be noted that canvas painting was popularized mainly in Venice, where the material was available in plenty at the harbor or within the city. They started canvas painting to apply the oil paints diligently for works that would last longer and could be kept anyhow.

 

Requirement: Even though it may seem weird to paint on a material used for making sails, it makes perfect sense, when one considers the fact that the material is heavy and the oil used would easily bind onto the surface of it. The blend with oil gives the color pigments much more strength to bind to one another as well as the texture they have been applied on. Oil painting was basically done on a heavy cloth known as canvas.

 

Understanding: Canvas painting from then on has been the art of painting, or should we say the most advanced art of painting. However, any ordinary person would not dare to start painting on the canvas and hope to obtain a fine art. It takes a long time to understand the texture of the canvas and more so to know the proper blending of oils and pigments. To start oil or canvas painting a person would face many hardships initially as the texture is not as smooth as a paper.

 

Perfection: Painting on paper is one task and to do it on canvas is another, as the amount of water used in watercolor painting may not be the same as the amount of oil used in canvas painting. Thus, like every individual technique canvas painting also has its unique style, which has to be mastered not by reading but by trying out a hand on it. Every time a person fails to do the proper thing he learns from his mistake and improvises from there. He continues until he finds the perfection of the subject he wants to bring out.

 

Execution: In canvas painting the canvas is fit to a wooden framed structure that holds the canvas firmly so that it does not slip or slacken. It is on this frame that the painting is done. Over the ages the types of canvas used to have varied, and now we have the traditional canvases that are stapled at the sides and the splinted canvases. This form of art has been accepted by many painters and has become the form of painting portraits and other realistic or abstract paintings.