Pastel: Pastel is an art medium in the form of a stick, consisting of pure powdered pigment and a binder. The pigments used in pastels are the same as those used to produce all colored art media, including oil paints.

Pencil: A pencil is a writing instrument or drawing instrument consisting of a thin stick of pigment (usually graphite, but can also be coloured pigment or charcoal) and clay, usually encased in a thin wood cylinder though paper and plastic sheaths are also used. Pencils are distinct from pens, which use a liquid marking material.

Photorealism: Photorealism is the genre of painting resembling a photograph, most recently seen in the splinter hyperrealism art movement. However, the term is primarily applied to paintings from the American photorealism art movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Plywood: Plywood is a type of engineered wood made from thin sheets of wood veneer, called plies or veneers. The layers are glued together, each with its grain at right angles to adjacent layers for greater strength. There are usually an odd number of plies, so that the grain on the outside plies runs in the same direction. The plies are bonded under heat and pressure with strong adhesives, usually phenol formaldehyde resin. A common reason for using plywood instead of plain wood is its resistance to cracking, shrinkage, twisting/warping, and its general high degree of strength. It has replaced many dimensional lumbers on construction applications for these reasons.

Pointillism: Pointillism is a style of painting in which small distinct points of primary colors create the impression of a wide selection of secondary and intermediate colors. The technique relies on the perceptive ability of the eye and mind of the viewer to mix the color spots into a fuller range of tones and is related closely to Divisionism, a more technical variant of the method. It is a style with few serious practitioners and is notably seen in the works of Seurat, Signac, and Cross. The word Pointillism is actually the incorrect term used more populary today than its actual name of Neo-Impressionism. The term itself was first coined by art critics in the late 1880s to ridicule the works of these artists and is now used without its earlier mocking connotation. The practice of Pointillism is in sharp contrast to the more common method of blending pigments on a palette or using the many commercially available premixed colors. The latter is analogous to the CMYK or four-color printing process used by personal color printers and large presses; Pointillism is not analogous to the colors and process used by computer monitors and television sets to produce colors; the latter uses green and no yellow at all to produce colors from green through orange as well as gray, brown and black.

Pont-Aven School: Group of young painters who espoused a style known as Synthetism and united under the tutelage of Paul Gauguin at Pont-Aven, Brittany, France, in the late 1880s and early 1890s. The artists included Émile Bernard, Charles Laval, Maxime Maufra, Paul Sérusier, Charles Filiger, Jacob Meyer de Haan, Armand Séguin, and Henri de Chamaillard. Their paintings showed an overall simplification, a highly expressive use of colour, and an intensely spiritual subject matter. When Gauguin left for Tahiti, members of the school became increasingly involved in developing the theories and techniques of Symbolism. (Source: Britannica Concise Encyclopedia)

Pop art: This movement was marked by a fascination with popular culture reflecting the affluence in post war society. It was most prominent in American art but soon spread to Britain. In celebratin everyday objects such as soup cans, washing powder, comic strips and soda pop bottles, the movement turned the commonplace into icons. Pop Art is a direct descendant of Dadaism in the way it mocks the established art world by appropriating images from the street, the supermarket, the mass media, and presents it as art in itself. Artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg took familiar objects such as flags and beer bottles as subjects for their paintings, while British artist Richard Hamilton used magazine imagery. The latter's definition of Pop Art - "popular, transient, expendable, low cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, and Big Business" - stressed its everyday, commonplace values. It was Andy Warhol, however, who really brought Pop Art to the public eye. His screen prints of Coke bottles, Campbell's soup tins and film stars are part of the iconography of the 20th century. Pop Art owed much to dada in the way it mocked the established art world. By embracing commercial techniques, and creating slick, machine-produced art, the Pop artists were setting themselves apart from the painterly, inward-looking tendencies of the Abstract Expressionist movement that immediately preceded them. The leading artists in Pop were Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Roy Hamilton, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Claes Oldenburg.

Portrait: A portrait is a painting, photograph, sculpture, or other artistic representation of a person, in which the face and its expression is predominant. The intent is to display the likeness, personality, and even the mood of the person. For this reason, in photography a portrait is generally not a snapshot, but a composed image of a person in a still position. A portrait often shows a person looking directly at the painter or photographer, in order to most successfully engage the subject with the viewer.

Post-Impressionism: Post-Impressionism is the term coined by the British artist and art critic Roger Fry in 1914, to describe the development of European art since Monet (Impressionism). Post-Impressionism was both an extension of Impressionism and a rejection of its limitations. Post-Impressionists continued using vivid colours, thick application of paint, distinctive brushstrokes and real-life subject matter, but they were more inclined to emphasize geometric forms, to distort form for expressive effect, and to use unnatural or arbitrary colour. The Post-Impressionists were dissatisfied with the triviality of subject matter and the loss of structure in Impressionist paintings, though they did not agree on the way forward. Georges Seurat and his followers concerned themselves with Pointillism, the systematic use of tiny dots of colour. Paul Cézanne set out to restore a sense of order and structure to painting. He achieved this by reducing objects to their basic shapes while retaining the bright fresh colours of Impressionism. Vincent Van Gogh used colour and vibrant swirling brush strokes to convey his feelings and his state of mind. Although they often exhibited together, they were not a cohesive movement. They worked in geographically disparate regions and in various stylistic categories, such as Fauvism and Cubism. Post-Impressionism is very important in France's artistic history.

Post-painterly Abstraction: Post-painterly Abstraction is a term created by art critic Clement Greenberg as the title for an exhibit he curated for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1964, which subsequently travelled to the Walker Art Center and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. Greenberg had perceived that there was a new movement in painting which derived from the Abstract Expressionism of the 1940s and 1950s but "favored openness or clarity" as opposed to the dense painterly surfaces of that painting style. The 31 artists in the exhibition included Walter Darby Bannard, Jack Bush, Gene Davis, Thomas Downing, Friedel Dzubas, Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler, Al Held, Ellsworth Kelly, Nicholas Krushenick, Alexander Liberman, Morris Louis, Howard Mehring, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella and a number of other American and Canadian artists who were becoming well known in the 1960s. As painting continued to move in different directions, powered by the spirit of innovation of the time, the term "Post-painterly Abstraction", which had obtained some currency in the 1960s, was gradually supplanted by "Minimalism", "Hard-edge painting", "Lyrical Abstraction" and "Color Field Painting".

Pre-Raphaelites: The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (also known as the Pre-Raphaelites) was a group of English painters, poets and critics, founded in 1848 by John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt. The group's intention was to reform art by rejecting what they considered to be the mechanistic approach adopted by the Mannerist artists who followed Raphael and Michelangelo. They believed that the Classical poses and elegant compositions of Raphael in particular had been a corrupting influence on academic teaching of art. Hence the name "Pre-Raphaelite". In particular they objected to the influence of Sir Joshua Reynolds, the founder of the English Royal Academy of Arts. They called him "Sir Sloshua", believing that his broad technique was a sloppy and formulaic form of academic Mannerism. In contrast they wanted to return to the abundant detail, intense colours, and complex compositions of Quattrocento Italian and Flemish art. The Pre-Raphaelites have been considered the first avant-garde movement in art, though they have also been denied that status, because they continued to accept both the concepts of history painting and of mimesis, or imitation of nature, as central to the purpose of art. However, the Pre-Raphaelites undoubtedly defined themselves as a reform movement, created a distinct name for their form of art, and published a periodical, The Germ, to promote their ideas. Their debates were recorded in the Pre-Raphaelite Journal.