STICKS, STONES, AND BROKEN BONES
Early human artists painted with what they could make from plants, animals, or minerals in the natural world. They dried and ground ingredients into a powder and blended this with water, animal fat, egg whites, or oil to make paints. At its heart, every paint is a pigment, or colored powder, and a binder, a colorless liquid. Mixing colors was so important in the 1700s in Europe that it became its own profession, called colormaking. Colormakers began to improve paints by making ever-more varied colors. Some used chemistry
