Value: A term indicating how dark or light a color is.
Varnish: A final coat applied to protect a painting from pollution, scratches, and other environmental dangers, which can be removed if necessary to clean the painting.
Veduta: A realistic representation of a landscape, specifically an urban landscape.
Vehicle: A vehicle is the binder that the pigment is combined with. It holds the pigment in suspension, carries the pigment, and provides the film for oil and acrylic colors.
Venice turpentine: A vegetable-based mixture of semi-solid resin and essential oil from the larch tree that is an ingredient in mediums and diluents for oil painting. Known as an oleoresin. Sometimes also referred to as Venetian Turpentine.
Verdaccio: A green underpainting usually created from a mixture of black, white and greenish pigments. It is used often to underpaint portraits in order to neutralize overlaid flesh tones.
Warm Colors: These colors are generally considered to have a bias towards red, orange or yellow. Warm colors bring subjects forward in a painting to the human eye.
Wash: A broad thin layer of paint.
Water-miscible: Capable of being mixed and cleaned with water.
Wetting Agent: An additive which allows a watercolor or ink to take smoothly and evenly on a support.
Whiting: A chalk-based additive used in making gesso and whitewash.
Yellowing: A tarnishing of an oil painting usually due to the excess use of linseed oil, the accumulation over time of dirt within the outer coat of varnish, or the use of non-archival varnishes. Can also refer to the patina a non-archival fixative takes on after time.