We just learned about the painting The Night Watch by Rembrandt.
Another famous painting was called Relativity by Dutch painter Maurits Cornelis Escher, also known as M. C. Escher, painted in 1953.
Escher was known for making his paintings very detailed and sometimes using math ideas to make his pictures interesting.
In his Relativity painting, there are many stairways that connect in strange ways, and people that look like they must be standing on the ceiling or on the walls.
(from: wikipedia - m. c. escher)
The way he made his painting was using something called a lithograph on limestone.
For a lithograph, first the artists take a large slab of limestone, and scrape it clean so there a nice flat surface to draw on.
Then they use something like a greasy oily crayon to draw the painting.
When the painting is done, they pour a type of acid and gooey sticky thing called gum arabic on the painting and spread it around and let it dry.
The acid and gum arabic sticks only to the parts that don't have oily crayon, and works like a clear cover for those areas.
After it is dry, they use something called a solvent, which washes away the oils from the crayon.
Then they pour liquid ink onto the limestone and rub it in, and that ink sticks only to where the oily crayon was.
They wash the limestone with water, and that washes off the liquid ink from the areas that didn't have crayon, because they are protected by that clear cover from the acid and gum arabic.
After all of that, the stone has oily ink only on the parts where the drawing is. They lay a sheet of paper on top of it, and press it down onto the stone, and when they remove the paper it has a copy of the painting the artist did.
They can make many copies from the same lithograph limestone, kind of like a copy machine before the copy machines were invented.
(from: wikipedia - lithography)
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