Since the dawn of life, this particular activity has kept men engrossed. Since we can remember or there has been an archive, lot many sketch works have been made by mankind. Prior to the invention of brushes and paints, people took resort to wall graffiti. They were not trained in the craft of painting by that time and appreciated the slipshod works they had perfected.



With time, arose the art of painting. Painters came to be known as men of renaissance. They added a lot to the perspective of whole society. Paintings could find its germ in social culture or it could simply be the result of a painter's weird imagination. In both the cases it aimed to achieve an air of lucidity that was in sync with the vision of the audience.

Paintings can be of many types. They can be done on walls and ceilings. This kind of painting has been manifest on the Sistine chapel in France. It is pioneering work of Michelangelo and the fresco painting depicts events from the life of Jesus Christ. In such forms, paintings are self-illustrative and act as a source of reference. The life-depiction that they seek to enumerate can be tied to any person or event.

Generally paintings are done on canvas. These are the most prolific form of painting. Such paintings can be in the form of landscape or portrait. In the former one, the length is far more than the breath. The portraits have reverse orientation. When people paint faces they choose portrait dimension. When they choose to paint events or a scene, they select landscape. Painters are known to be an experimenting breed; they can very well innovate the other way round.

Paintings can have broad and narrow classifications. Few of them are figurative paintings, nude paintings and paintings on still life. Paintings on still life need a lot of observation both by the painter and the audience. A connoisseur is adept at understanding the various nuances involved in such painting. Nude paintings require a lot of class. Through brush stroke and interspersing of faint and bold colors, a painter is expected to create the right contours. Imagine, if the contours are not up to the mark, how a misbalanced body would look.

A lot many painting revolutions have gripped mankind. Few were rich in implementation. Others were great with perspective. Few were dominant in both the feature. For instance, Pablo Picasso's Cubism was a radical idea. It depicted objects as conceived by God and not as perceived by us. This is why an apple painted by Picasso simultaneously had both the sides upfront. After all God could see both the sides together. The idea was seeing objects from a vantage point.

Next, there was Salvador Dali who brought a revolution called Surrealism. Surrealism was all about painting objects so that they only loosely related to life and created a fabric of the artificial. He would paint mountains fixed in clouds as if the mountains were hanging.

Impressionism by Paul Cezanne was another radical painting idea. It depicted everything in spikes and pointed forms. It was the result of negative psyche created by years of Nazi oppression. Renoir was another pioneer of it.