Watercolor painting A guide to materials and equipment – everything you really need

Book excerpt: Introduction Of all the painting mediums that have evolved over the centuries, it’s a fairly safe bet that watercolour was the first. Colours may have been limited to browns, umbers or ochres depending on where your cave was located but at some stage our ancestors would have passed the occasional happy hour stirring around in a puddle with a stick and making marks on themselves and on nearby rocks and walls. All over the world there are examples of cave art that dates back to pre-historic times, where individuals have portrayed figures and animals in particular and in the process found different coloured pigments as well as charcoal from the fire to make their paintings more effective.