Art Of Ancient Egypt

    Ancient Egyptian art is the painting, sculpture, architecture and other arts produced by the civilization of ancient egypt in the lower Nile Valley from about 3000 BC to 30 AD. Ancient Egyptian art reached a high level in painting and sculpture, and was both highly stylized and symbolic. It was famously conservative, and Egyptian styles changed remarkably little over more than three thousand years. Much of the surviving art comes from tombs and monuments and thus there is an emphasis on life after death and the preservation of knowledge of the past.

        Ancient Egyptian art included paintings, sculpture in wood (now rarely surviving), stone and ceramics, drawings on papyrus, faience, jewelry, ivories, and other art media. It displays an extraordinarily vivid representation of the ancient Egyptian's socioeconomic status and belief systems.

PAINTING 

The Egyptian figure convention

• Not all Egyptian reliefs were painted, and less prestigious works in tombs, temples and palaces were merely painted on a flat surface. 
• Stone surfaces were prepared by whitewash, or if rough, a layer of coarse mud plaster, with a smoother gesso layer above some finer limestones could take paint directly. 
• The binding medium used in painting remains unclear such as egg tempera and various gums and resins have been suggested. It is clear that true fresco, painted into a thin layer of wet plaster, was not used. Instead the paint was applied to dried plaster, in what is called "fresco a secco" in Italian. 
• Many ancient Egyptian paintings have survived in tombs, and sometimes temples, due to Egypt's extremely dry climate.
• For example, the painting to the right shows the head from a profile view and the body from a frontal view. Their main colors were red, blue, green, gold, black and yellow.