The history of toner painting can be traced back to the Paleolithic Age. At that time, people painted familiar animals, labor and other scenes in caves with pigments ground from stone powder, leaving many mysterious and long-lasting visual memories. In the Middle Ages, painters used toner blocks to paint. Renaissance masters (such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, holbein, etc. ) draw your own creative drafts and exercises with color paints made of mineral powder, but most of the color paints at this time are monochrome, similar to sketches, and the colors are relatively simple. In the17th century, due to the practice of many painters, toner painting gradually developed from monochrome to multicolor, and the relationship between colors was used to deal with the picture.

Among the pigments used in human painting, solid toner material has the longest history, and chalk and red chalk used in the early days can be said to be the embryonic form of colored chalk. Chalk is chalk. From the works handed down by many masters in the European Renaissance, we can see many sketches drawn with chalk or red chalk. Some of them broke through the standard of monochrome and added one or two simple colors, which people called "coloring sketch". This kind of "color sketch" is the beginning of the evolution to color painting. It quickly developed into a kind of painting called "three-color chalk technique". That is, a few colors (mostly black, blood red and white chalk) are used to draw directly on the drawing paper coated with a certain background color.

Judging from the available data, earlier ones such as Luca Sinorelli of Italy (1445? -1523). Later, The Old Man Standing painted by Jacopo Bassano (151592) belongs to this kind of work. Although this three-color chalk technique only uses three or four colors, it has great changes compared with color sketch. First, there is a preliminary change from sketch to color painting style, while retaining the brush strokes and loose characteristics of sketch, initially forming a unique personality different from other painting types. The second is to use simple colored pens and different forms of strokes on the background color to organize the color relationship that is much more complicated than these colors. The basic feature of toner painting art is to directly express thousands of colors with limited color pens. Therefore, the emergence of three-color chalk techniques can be regarded as the birth of the art of toner painting.

Then, due to more and more complete materials and mature techniques, the status of toner painting as an independent painting was established in this period and quickly spread throughout Europe. /kloc-in the 8th century, painters from France, Britain and Italy (such as Boucher, Xia Erdan, Kurt, Rosa Saba, Calliera, etc. ) Portraits and genre paintings were represented with toner, and the application scope of toner painting was further broadened, which made the toner painting in this period unprecedentedly prosperous. /kloc-in the 0/9th century, toner painting was further developed in Europe, America and other countries. With the rise of impressionist painting, toner, as a form of color painting, has attracted more attention. Degas, Vier, cassatt and other masters pushed famille rose, an ancient and young painting, to the peak of art, leaving many immortal works, such as The Woman in the Bath, The Star, In front of the Mirror and so on.

Toner painting has a profound tradition in the west, and has the same status as oil painting and watercolor painting. From Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo in the Renaissance to 19, masters such as Delacroix, Miller, Manet, Renoir, Degas and cassatt in the 20th century, many classic toner paintings were left behind.