I guess I’ll start an oil painting while the egg tempera dries

I’m work­ing on fairly large egg tem­pera painting—24 × 18”. Cer­tainly not enor­mous, but larger than I’ve worked in tem­pera before. There are some large gra­da­tions that I’ve been work­ing over with a bris­tle flat. When­ever I teach a tem­pera class, I have to push the stu­dents to use a dry brush and not use glom it on like they did with poster paint back in the 4^th grade. That allows many lay­ers to be applied in one session.

For the larger pas­sages, how­ever, I have found myself work­ing with a pretty wet brush. After a few lay­ers, the paint feels moist. I some­times use a hair dryer (held at a con­sid­er­able dis­tance to avoid cook­ing the yolk binder) to dry the sur­face and allow my to apply another layer more quickly. I’m find­ing that insuf­fi­cient. The sur­face of the paint stays moist and the dryer doesn’t affect it, as if the mul­ti­ple lay­ers of paint are keep­ing a cer­tain amount of water locked in lower lay­ers that won’t be affected by just blow­ing air on the sur­face. I need to stop paint­ing now so that I don’t start dig­ging up pre­vi­ous lay­ers as I add more paint. It should be OK to paint on again in a day or two.

Huh. Never had that hap­pen before. I’ve encoun­tered this when apply­ing mul­ti­ple lay­ers of tem­pera grassa (egg-oil emul­sion) but never before with pure egg tempera.

You can strengthen a tem­pera paint­ing, by the way, by sit­ting it in a sunny win­dow for a few hours. The actinic light helps to cure the paint. You can also gen­tly pol­ish the hard­ened yolk sur­face with a piece of soft cot­ton, silk, or cheese­cloth. This makes the dried layer smoother and more accept­ing of paint; it also helps even out any dif­fer­ences in sheen caused by vary­ing yolk to pig­ment ratios.

Update

6 Feb­ru­ary 2007 (the fol­low­ing day): the paint has fully hard­ened and is ready to paint on again.