About Green Paint_40424

The first forms of art were created using paint. Before sculpture or any other kind of artistic expression, cavemen used paint to decorate the walls of their caves. The base of paint is pigment, or color, ground from a hued material. The first paints were made by mixing clay and ground dirt with spit or fat to create a colored paste. In the 1800s, paint was made with oil as a base. Today, paints are made chemically and the texture is more refined.

Green paint in particular didn抰 show up in early cave paintings. It was the Egyptians who first used green, mixing grass and other natural materials to create green for their hieroglyphics. In the 1800s, copper抯 green oxides were used for stronger, richer greens. For sea greens and softer colors they added white metallic oxides.

Other natural sources of green paint include the juice of blackthorn berries, malachite (a carbonate mineral that is a semi precious stone), parsley juice, and other flowers, berries and plants. Arsenic was used to create the color green in paint up until 1778, when an acidic copper arsenate called Scheele's Green took its place. While Scheele抯 Green was toxic and eventually replaced with safer pigments, at the time it was the safest green around, since arsenic is very lethal.

Many green paints in history were made from metals. For instance, copper oxidizes into a greenish color which can then be ground down into a dry pigment. On top of copper, chromium, mercury, and ultramarine are other metals and elements that have been and are used to create green pigment for paint.

Of course, the simplest way of making green paint is to mix blue and yellow paints. Blue and yellow pigments are available in nature, the different hues providing endless colors of green. Blue pigment can be made from crushed semi precious stones such as lapis lazuli or made from fermented leaves of the Indian indigo plant. Yellows have been made in the past from bovine urine. The cows were fed exclusively mango leaves. The urine was then evaporated and coated in mud for transportation to where the paint was being mixed.