A paintings may have for their support such surfaces as walls, paper, canvas, wood, glass, lacquer, clay, leaf, copper or concrete, and may incorporate multiple other materials including sand, clay, paper, gold leaf as well as objects.

Painting is a mode of creative expression, and the forms are numerous. Drawing, composition or abstraction, among other aesthetics, may serve to manifest the expressive and conceptual intention of the practitioner. Paintings can be naturalistic and representational (as in a still life painting or a landscape painting), photographic, abstract, be loaded with narrative content (as in Symbolism), emotive (as in Expressionism), or political in nature (as in Artivism).