Egg tempera

is a type of paint made by mix­ing pig­ment with egg yolk.* This week I’ve been work­ing on an egg tem­pera study (sev­eral fig­ures copied from paint­ings by Fra Angelico), to use as a demo piece for the Renais­sance paint­ing work­shop I’m doing at Wet­can­vas and for an egg tem­pera class my wife and I will be teach­ing at a Soci­ety for Cre­ative Anachro­nism event this Sat­ur­day.

I hadn’t done much tem­pera in the last year. I for­got what a beau­ti­ful medium it is. The paint­ing process is to apply many fine hatch­ing strokes with a dry brush, build­ing up value slowly in a man­ner sim­i­lar to work­ing with a graphite pen­cil. The result is unlike any other medium. At first it’s frus­trat­ing, because I make a lot of lit­tle mis­takes. Drat! I have too much paint on the brush. Akk! There’s still too much paint. Gah! I’m paint­ing over an area that’s still wet and the paint is com­ing up. If you are try­ing to build tone, you grad­u­ally weave strokes back and forth, back and forth. You get into a kind of men­tal zone and sud­denly it looks exactly right.

I need to do more tem­pera painting.

*If you are unfa­mil­iar with paint­ing media, please don’t con­fuse egg tem­pera with “tem­pera” poster paints for chil­dren. Other than being kinds of paint, they have noth­ing at all to do with each other.