Painting techniques: How oil, fresco, tempera and encaustic actually work

You'll learn how four painting techniques, encaustic, tempera, fresco and oil, actually worked, from heated wax and wet plaster to slow-drying oil on canvas. By the end, you'll be able to look at an old painting and make a decent guess at how and roughly when it was made.

Painting technique and painting style are different. Impressionism and Realism describe how a finished piece looks. Encaustic, tempera, fresco, and oil describe what physically holds the pigment together and how it gets onto a surface. Separate those two ideas and old paintings stop being one big blur of "historical art" and start looking like a handful of genuinely different physical processes, some of which barely survive contact with water.

A common assumption is that oil paint was always the default. It wasn't. For most of painting's history, artists worked with wax, plaster or egg, and oil only became the standard a few centuries ago.

Fresco means painting pigment directly into wet plaster, so the color becomes part of the wall itself as it dries. That's part of why frescoes have survived for thousands of years on surfaces never meant to move, and why the technique is so unforgiving: get the timing wrong, and the whole section has to be redone before the plaster sets. Can frescoes be modern? Looks at how the method held up long after antiquity.

Encaustic works differently. Pigment gets mixed into heated beeswax and painted on while the wax is still warm, then hardens as it cools. How encaustic stayed ahead of its time traces the technique from Egyptian mummy portraits onward.

Tempera and oil work the opposite way: instead of becoming part of a wall, pigment gets bound to something portable, wood panels first, then canvas. Tempera mixes pigment with egg yolk, which dries fast and forces artists into thin, careful layers. How to create masterpieces with eggs gets into why that speed shaped the look of early panel paintings.

Oil paint swaps egg for oil, which dries much more slowly and lets artists blend colours and rework sections over days instead of minutes. That patience is part of why oil eventually became the technique behind most paintings you'd recognize from a museum.

You don't need to do this unit in order. If you're curious about the oldest surviving portraits, encaustic is the natural starting point. If wall art and murals interest you more, fresco is a better place to start. And if you want the technique behind most paintings you'd recognise from a museum, oil is where most of that story lives. There's no lesson elsewhere in Art you need to finish first; this unit stands on its own.

Painting techniques doesn't assume you've completed any other unit in Art. It pays off once you move on to units built around specific painters or paintings, since knowing the physical difference between fresco and oil makes it easier to understand why certain works look the way they do or have held up the way they have. If you'd rather get the lay of the land first, Nibble's Art topic starts with how to learn art.