Some more thoughts on egg tempera

“Tem­pera isn’t hard. It’s just slow.”

—George Tooker

I’ve been play­ing a bit more with egg tem­pera lately, and remem­ber­ing why I like it so much. I can under­stand why tem­pera went largely out of fash­ion in the 16^th cen­tury: oil paint has a greater value range (because oil darks are darker than tem­pera darks), so much can be done with blend­ing in oil, and oil paint is per­haps more resis­tant to dam­age (although tem­pera doesn’t crack and yel­low as oil does).

Tem­pera, how­ever, has its own prop­er­ties to rec­om­mend it.

• Many col­ors have more chroma and del­i­cacy in tem­pera than in oil. Ultra­ma­rine blue, for exam­ple, is lighter and more sat­u­rated in tem­pera than in oil—it’s like a dif­fer­ent color. Earth pig­ments have a clar­ity and vibrancy that they do not have in oil. And earths that are barely dis­tin­guish­able from each other in oil paint have very dis­tinc­tive char­ac­ters in tem­pera. Sien­nas, red ochres, yel­low ochres, golden ochres, green umbers, red umbers, burnt sien­nas, hematites, mala­chites, and so many other earths have prop­er­ties that can­not be fully explored in oil paint, but which really come into their own when tem­pered with egg yolk.
• In tem­pera, pig­ments do not loose as much chroma when mixed with white or black as they do in oil. Tints are less chalky and shades are less dull. In tem­pera, you can work with higher chroma with­out look­ing gar­ish the way really intense oil paints do. That helps to com­pen­sate for the reduced value range and gives tem­pera paint­ings a sense of del­i­cacy and refine­ment with­out dullness.
• In oil paint, you can glaze, scum­ble, and par­tially mix mul­ti­ple col­ors to achieve inter­est­ing opti­cal mix­tures. In tem­pera, the clos­est you can come to that is the petit lac tech­nique com­mon in Greek and Russ­ian icon paint­ing: you put a wet pud­dle on a panel that is hor­i­zon­tal and use the brush to very gen­tly spread the paint with­out break­ing the sur­face ten­sion. That results in inter­est­ing, slightly mot­tled sur­face effects. In tem­pera, you can also use layer after layer of cross­hatch­ing, weav­ing col­ors across and over each other, to pro­duce sub­tle opti­cal effects.

There are also ways to use tem­pera and oil together as mixed media. Tem­pera makes a great lean under­paint­ing for oil glazes, and tem­pera can be painted into wet oil paint to cre­ate crisp details. I hope to explore some of these in the future to try to make use of the best prop­er­ties of each medium.

If you have an inter­est in egg tem­pera, I can’t rec­om­mend The Prac­tice of Tem­pera Paint­ing by Daniel V. Thomp­son highly enough. It cov­ers the prepa­ra­tion of sup­ports and grounds, choos­ing and work­ing with pig­ments, doing under­draw­ings, appli­ca­tion of paint, and gild­ing. I would only note that (a) you don’t really have to grind mod­ern pig­ments with a muller and slab; you can just put them in a jar with water and shake; (b) his list of pig­ments is a lit­tle dated; and © we now know that Ital­ian tem­pera painters did not use a detailed under­draw­ing as a crit­i­cal com­po­nent of the devel­op­ment of a painting’s value scale. Other than those details, the infor­ma­tion in the book is as use­ful today as it was when the sec­ond edi­tion was pub­lished in 1962.