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Whether an artwork reaches completion by careful stages or was executed directly by a hit-or-miss alla prima method (in which medium are laid on in a single application) was previously decided by the ideals and familiar systems of its cultural tradition. For example, the medieval European illuminator’s painstaking procedure, by which a detailed linear pattern was gradually gilded with gold leaf and precious pigments, was contemporary with the Sung Chinese Zen practice of quick, calligraphic brush painting, after a restive period of disciplined self-preparation. More recently, the artist has decided the technique and working formula best suited to his aims and temperament. In France in the 1880s, for instance, Seurat may be working in his studio on sketches, tone studies, and colour schemes in preparation for a large composition at the same time that, outdoors, Monet was endeavouring to emulate the effects of afternoon light and atmosphere, while Cézanne analyzed the structure of the mountain Sainte-Victoire with deliberated brush strokes, laid as irrevocably as mosaic tesserae (small pieces, such as marble or tile).

This type of communication established between creator and patron, the site and subject matter of a painting commission, and the physical properties of the medium used could also dictate working procedure. Peter Paul Rubens, for example, followed the business-like 17th-century tradition of painting a small oil sketch, or modella, for his patron’s approval before creating a full-sized commission. Distinctive problems specific to mural painting, such as viewer eye level and the size, style, and function of a building interior, had first to be solved in preliminary drawings and sometimes by using wax figurines or scale representations of the interior. Scale working realizations are crucial to the speed and precision of execution demanded by quick-drying mediums, such as buon’ fresco (see below Fresco) on wet plaster, and acrylic resin on canvas. The drawings traditionally are divided with a frame of squares, or “squared-up,” for enlarging on the surface of the support. Some modern painters prefer to outline the enlargement of a sketch projected directly onto the support by epidiascope (a projector for images of both opaque and transparent objects). In Renaissance painters’ workshops, their assistants not only ground and mixed the pigments and prepared the supports and painting surfaces but often laid in the outlines and broad masses of the painting from the master’s design and studies.

The distinctive properties of its medium or the atmospheric conditions of a site may themselves preserve a painting. The wax solvent binder of encaustic paintings (in which after application, the paint is fixed by heat [see below Mediums], for example) both keeps the intensity and tonality of the original colours and protects the surface from damp. And, while prehistoric rock paintings and buon’ frescoes are preserved by natural chemical action, the tempera pigments thought to be fixed only with water on many ancient Egyptian murals are conserved by the dry climate and unvarying temperature of the tombs. It has, however, been customary to varnish oil paintings, both to protect the surface against damage by dust and handling and to restore the tonality lost when some darker pigments dry out into a higher key. Unfortunately, varnish tends to darken and yellow with time into the sometimes disastrously imitated “Old Masters’ mellow patina.” Once esteemed, this amber-gravy film is now generally removed to reveal colours in their original intensity. Glass started to replace varnish toward the end of the 19th century, when painters wished to retain the fresh, luminous finish of pigments applied directly to a pure white ground. Air-conditioning and temperature-control systems of modern museums make both varnishing and glazing unnecessary, except for older and more fragile exhibits.

The frames surrounding early altarpieces, icons, and cassone panels (painted panels on the chest used for a bride’s household linen) were often structural parts of the support. With the introduction of portable easel pictures, heavy frames not only provided some protection from being stolen and damage but were also considered an aesthetic enhancement to a painting, and frame making became a specialized craft. Gilded gesso moldings (made of plaster of paris and sizing that forms the surface for low relief) in extravagant presentations of fruit and flowers certainly seem almost an extension of the restless, exuberant design of a Baroque or Rococo painting. A hefty frame also provided a proscenium (in a theatre, the area between the orchestra and the curtain) in which the picture was isolated from its immediate surroundings, thus adding to the window view illusion intended by the artist. Deep, ornate frames are unsuitable for many modern paintings, where the artist’s intention is for his forms to appear to advance toward the spectator rather than be viewed as if through a wall opening. In contemporary Minimalist paintings, no effects of spatial illusionism are intended; and, in order to emphasize the physical shape of the support itself and to accent its flatness, these abstract, geometrical designs are usually displayed without frames or are merely edged with thin protective strips of wood or metal.

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