Humans have felt the need to leave their mark on the world in the form of painted

images since prehistory. If we look at how art evolved over the years we can know a
number of things about the people that created them and the societies they lived in. At
some point, early man figured out that by mixing colour giving particles known as
pigments into a medium like water or saliva- paint could be created!

If you look at paint under a microscope you will see that paint is coloured pigment that is
suspended in a medium. Pigments come from multiple sources such as minerals or
elements, plants and vegetables, and some are even extracted from insects. The
medium could be a variety of substances from oil or egg-yolk in paintings, plaster in
frescos or plastic alloys in the case of automobiles.

It is generally accepted that the first known paintings are some 15,000 years old and are preserved in the caves of Altamira
in Spain and Lascaux in France, although some experts date these at 20,000+ BC.

The Egyptians painted the Pharaoh's tombs around 1500 BC importing pigments from as far away as India. Around this time
paint making as an art became quite widely established in Crete and Greece with the Egyptians passing their skills to the
Romans. However the fall of the Roman Empire around 400AD led to paint making becoming a lost art until the English re-
learnt the techniques in the Middle Ages. Initially this was to decorate their churches and then in the houses of wealthy
noblemen and aristocrats.

At about the same time, Italian craftsmen developed their own paint making skills in a highly secret fashion. Confidentiality
was so tight that often the knowledge of the process was not passed to successors and died out with each generation.

Commercial manufacture commenced in Europe and the United States of America in the 1700s being a highly manual
operation. In the 1800s mechanisation started and in the last century major advancements in paint chemistry and paint
technology caused the available range to mushroom.

The materials used in the pre-history paintings are the earth colours, chalk, bone and burnt wood. The paintings are
extremely delicate, irreplaceable and consequently not open to the general viewing as the modern environment of strong
light, cigarette smoke and man made pollutants would quickly destroy these fragile works. However as these cave drawings
were produced by the use of colour applied directly to the cave walls while the results were paintings, the media used was
not strictly paint. Possibly by accident, paints were only produced when the colours or pigments were mixed with a second
material thus producing a material that could be more readily applied. This material is currently called a medium but those
thousands of years ago would have been egg white / albumen or blood.