Artists use oils, alkyds and acrylic paints to paint on canvas and such other materials as wood panel.
Water colors, chalk and gouache are used primarily on paper. Tempera is an old artist medium used on canvas and panel. The same pigments used in traditional tempera painting is also used in fresco, which is painting directly into wet plaster on walls. Encaustic is another painting medium that incorporates using beeswax and ground pigments to paint with on wood panel.
Artists use pencil, ink and charcoal in fine arts drawing applications for both sketches and completed work in black and white or with minimal color using sepia tones. Oil pastel and crayons allow artists to achieve a similar effect as working with oil paint, but with a drier medium and the type of control that for some is more precise than working with a brush.
Other mediums for works on paper include prints, etchings and silkscreens. Unlike drawing mediums, these works on paper involve applying ink to an image made in reverse, which when applied to paper, will yield one or more versions of the artist's intended image. The images are made by etching images into metal, by carving images into woodblocks or other thick materials, and via mechanized forms of silkscreening and printing.
Sculpting is among the oldest art forms and has been the method of crafting ritual objects, utilitarian ones and objects designed to be nothing more than pleasing to the eye. Traditional sculpture mediums include wood; quarried rocks such as marble; rough-hewn stone; ivory; metals such as bronze, gold, silver and amalgams; glass, and such clays as terracotta and porcelain. In contemporary applications, paper, plastic, fabric and other objects have found their places in sculpture.
Since the 19th century, photography has been a source for documentation and artistic revelation and creation. Photographic mediums range from stills (photographs) in a variety of formats to moving pictures. Works on film include black and white, sepia, and color photography and film; large- and medium-format photography; 35mm, silver tints and aquatints. People now produce both photographs and moving images digitally. Moving film mediums include 8mm and video in several different formats.