In the 19th century (especially in Germany), painting recipes were developed that involved various combinations of tempera ingredients, often including some combination of egg white, whole egg, linseed oil, stand oil, dammar varnish, stand oil, and turpentine. You can find many such recipes on the internet with a few simple Google searches. I’ve usually avoided these relatively complex recipes in favor of simple emulsions of egg yolk (the traditional binder for egg tempera) and linseed or walnut oil, mixed with pigment/water paste.

Recently, I ran across a web reprint of Egg Tempera Painting, Tempera Underpainting, Oil Emulsion Painting: A Manual of Technique, by Vaclav Vitlacyl and Rupert Davidson Turnbull. Published in 1935, it is a compendium of various tempera techniques. One that caught my eye is a recipe they call “putrido.” Putrido is one name for tempera grassa (because it starts to smell bad after a few days). They say that this is based on a recipe from an old manuscript found in Venice. For all I know it’s what was used in the Renaissance.

Take whatever quantity of dry color you wish to prepare. Divide it into two equal parts. Rub up one part with yolk of egg only into a fairly stiff paste. Rub up the other part with sun-bleached linseed oil, to about the consistency of ordinary tube colours. (To save time or trouble, it is possible to use ordinary tube oil colours, but to be sure of your ingredients, it is always advisable to grind your own colour in oil.) The part that is rubbed up with oil may be slightly larger in quantity than the part rubbed with yolk of egg. Then take the two parts so prepared and grind them together, preferably on the marble slab. It will be found that when these two parts are put together, the resultant mixture will stiffen at once into a very stiff paste, too stiff to be easily rubbed. This may be softened down by the addition of either water, emulsion, or linseed oil. If you wish to use the Putrido in its leaner form, add either water or the emulsion (Medium Fat Emulsion), but if you wish to paint with it as an oil paint using oil as the medium, then thin it down with oil. In either case, add the water, the emulsion, or the oil very slowly, only a few drops at a time, until the paste becomes a smooth cream easily handled on the marble slab.

I find this to be pretty interesting. It is a recipe that is similar to what I’ve done before, is simple to make, doesn’t involve solvents, and uses egg yolk (rather than the white or the whole egg), with which I am more familiar. They suggest that adding a small amount of oil of clove will preserve the paint mixture and allow it to be kept for some time (although not indefinitely). I expect that storing them in a refrigerator, especially in warm weather, would be a good idea. The oil of clove would also act as a retarder for the oil component of the paint, causing to dry more slowly. That could be a good or a bad thing, but I expect one would have to wait between layers for the paint to dry. You could try to balance the retarding effect of the clove oil by adding a small amount of lead napthenate, but that makes for a more complex reaction than I am really comfortable with.

I’ll have to try this recipe soon. I have a large painting that I started in tempera and then stopped work on. It might make an excellent underpainting for this TG recipe.

i have just bought pigment powder and am preparing wood (with gesso) to make an icon type painting…can you give me any tips on mixing egg tempera…the type of oil etc.

Prepare pigments as follows: while wearing a dust mask, use a palette knife or spoon to transfer each pigment to a small glass jar (baby food jars work great if you first boil them for 20 minutes to remove bacteria). Add distilled water. Put the cap on the jar and shake. You now have a pigment paste. Take the mask off, since there isn’t any more pigment dust to worry about.

Separate an egg yolk into another jar. Add about a teaspoon of distilled water and mix. To make egg tempera paint, mix about equal amounts of the egg mixture with pigment paste.

This is classic egg tempera of the sort that is used to make ikons (I’m pretty sure about that, but I am no expert on ikon painting). You can add other substances to it (oils, resins, etc.), but I suggest you learn to paint with just yolk, water, and pigment before you try to experiment with more complex mixtures.

Have fun.

That’s one way to paint in tempera, and one that every tempera painter should probably familiarize themselves with.

But there are really only three constraints on tempera painting:

• You need to paint on a rigid support, preferrably on traditional gesso.
• You need to get the right ratio of pigment to egg yolk binder when painting (you can then thin it as much as you want with water).
• You can’t paint with thick blobs of impasto.

That’s it. You can use thick bristle brushes if you want. You can use a well-loaded brush, drybrush, or even tilt the panel horizontal and paint with loose washes. Wet paint can be blended. You can apply layer after layer of glazing. You can scrape the paint back, apply it with sponges, paint with your fingers, or rub partially dry paint to create textural effects.

Tempera is not fussy.

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.

Here are two swatches of ultramarine blue. The one on the left is in egg tempera. The one on the right is Doak’s ultramarine blue medium oil paint. Both are mixed with titanium white at the bottom. It’s not as obvious in this photo as it is in real life that the tempera is lighter and higher in chroma. A number of pigments, especially earths, are brighter in tempera.

“In art as in literature, ugliness rendered with compassion is beauty.”
—W. Joe Innis

This may be the 20th century painting I most admire. It’s “Adam,” an egg tempera painting by Andrew Wyeth. It depicts Adam Johnson, a poor farmer and a neighbor and friend of Wyeth’s. It was painted in 1963, the year I was born.

I think this is a great painting because it projects a sense of compassion. You feel Adam’s hard life, and you feel a sense of connectedness to him. He’s a real person, a human being with his own life, his own humanity, his own tragedy. You don’t know his story (although you can imagine a small part of it from the context), but there is a strong sense that there is one. Few paintings, even by great artists, manage this.

When I used this as an example of a great painting on an internet art forum awhile back, one poster didn’t get it. He said that the use of a poor black man in a painting was just another banal stereotype. The painting was kitsch, not art. I disagree. Wyeth knew this man. He wasn’t painting some symbol of underclass rural life, he was painting Adam Johnson, his friend.

I also think the composition is brilliant. The format is very wide, with Adam presented in three-quarter front view just slightly offset from center. The middle ground objects, and the background hills, curve downward to the right behind Adam, creating a sense of dynamic movement juxtaposed against the stasis of the obese Adam standing stolidly in the foreground with his eyes resolutely shut. The eye is stopped at the right by the fence post and at the left by the handles of the tools leaning against the wall, keeping us within the scene (it’s not easy to do that in such a wide-format painting). The sense of movement in the background is enhanced by the flock of birds in flight, an effect that would seem excessively melodramatic, but in the context of such a grounded picture it gives a sense of strangeness that speaks to another level of reality within world created by the painting.

It’s not a pretty picture, but it’s a deeply humane one.

Go to a museum some time and look at some paintings from the Renaissance. Notice any absence of color? Dullness? Inability to obtain mixtures that convey a sense of reality? Muddiness? Poor color harmony? Unrealistic flesh tones? No? Many of those paintings were done with six or seven total pigments. Not pigments carefully selected to create an optimal palette from among hundreds of colors available in in an art store, but six or seven pigments selected from maybe ten or twelve that the artist could get. And yet they made some of the most gorgeous paintings ever created.

If you like the way paintings from before 1800 look, one option is to select a palette of colors that replicates those available then. So here is a simple palette that is similar to what was available in Western Europe before the new synthetic pigments began to be discovered in the late 1700’s.

White: lead white was about it. If you want to simulate the color and opacity (not the handling properties) of lead white, mix titanium white and zinc white at about 50/50, then add a tiny touch of yellow ochre.

Black: usually bone black (now called “ivory” black), lamp black, or vine black.

Red: genuine vermilion, which you can simulate with cadmium red light. Red lake, which you can simulate with rose madder or alizarin crimson. Minium (red lead) which you can simulate with cadmium orange mixed with cadmium red light.

Blue: mineral ultramarine, which you can simulate with modern synthetic ultramarine (if you want to simulate cheaper grades of this incredibly expensive pigment, add some white and black). Azurite, which you can simulate with cobalt blue. Indigo, which you can simulate with Prussian blue mixed 50/50 with black.

Yellow: lead tin yellow, which you can simulate with a 50/50 mix of cadmium yellow light and yellow ochre. Later on, Naples yellow gradually replaced lead tin yellow. It is similar, but more like 2 parts cadmium yellow light to 3 parts yellow ochre.

Green: greens were usually mixed from ultramarine or azurite and lead tin yellow or Naples yellow. They also had copper green (used only sometimes, since it was known to turn brown unless isolated between layers of varnish), which can be simulated with viridian.

Violet: was usually mixed with red lake and a blue.

Orange: was usually mixed with vermilion and lead tin yellow or Naples yellow.

Earths: a wide range of earths were available, depending on where the artist lived. These included equivalents to modern raw sienna, burnt sienna, raw umber, burnt umber, yellow ochre, red ochre, green earth, black earth, brown earth. They also sometimes used malachite, which you can simulate with 1 part viridian to 5 parts white.

There were a few others used from time to time, but these were the common ones. Most artists didn’t use all of these.

Try using this palette for a few paintings. You’ll get a much better sense of how “Old Masters” did their color mixing.

“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 16th 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.

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.