- ****TEMPERA**** - Your thougts

[Kan Muftić]

It's apparently one of the oldest mediums to paint. I hated it back in the ground school.
So I challenge myself now to try it out and it's kinda weird.. I used to paint with oils and felt quite confident there.. But tempera..

I suggest we put our thoughts and tipps on "how to". I will share some of my thoughts for sure, cause I feel like a complete noob with it.

Cheers,

Khan

P.S. - This was done with tempera, btw.

[Serpian]

Does the tempera medium itself give that example its vibrant colours, or is it just the choices of the artist?

[Kan Muftić]

Frankly, I have no clue.. Looking at this legendary masterpiece makes me really wonder how he did it.. How can ANYONE control that medium?

1. it dries waaay to fast
2. it doesnt blend well, not even in "wet in wet" modus
3. once dry, it comes off the paper very easy.

So guys,
I cannot believe that none uses tempera here?! C'mon, let's hear what your experiance is with it, please..

Thanks,

Kan

[johanflod]

"The techniques of tempera painting can be more precise when used with traditional techniques that require the application of numerous small brush strokes applied in a cross-hatching technique. The colors, which are painted over each other, resemble a pastel when unvarnished, and are deeper colors when varnished." source wikipedia.

[dbclemons]

I haven't painted in egg tempera for quite a while. It's a lovely medium, but takes special patience. The application is something like drawing or perhaps engraving in a sense. You apply thin lines of color in glazes instead of broad thick strokes as with other mediums. Like drawing or inks, the blending is really more like cross-hatching. The colors tend to be more vibrant when you're painting over a bright ground. After the egg cures for several months it's quite permanent.

Kan, are you using a commercial brand of tempera paint, or making your own?

I'm not sure if that Michelangelo "Doni Tondo" painting above is a mix of oil and tempera (likely is - some places say it is, some don't) but undertones in tempera and overpainting in oil was a common practice back then.

More accurate information can be found here:
http://www.eggtempera.com/

[Cepro]

Somebody once told me tempera had longer durablity than oilpaint (at least the oil-paint you get out of tubes).
If you mix it youself, you can either have thin glazes or very thick paint. I used it once, but I totaly forgot how it was.

[Kan Muftić]

Hey, thanks guys!

dbclemons: I am using a standard, comercial version of tempera. I don't even think it's the same thing as EGG tempera..

Anyway, after playing with it for a day, I can say that thick paint blocking won't work.
But what did work is putting a sketch with a brush, then applying dif. colors that made a cool bgr and then laying the base color of the object.
Once dried, I applied layers of colors over it. It didn't blend too well though..

Any actual tutorials on how to use it?
Boy, I wish I picked that back in the school..

Thanks,

Khan

[dbclemons]

If it's labeled as "egg tempera" then it should have some egg in it. I think Sennelier makes their's with dried yolk, vegetable oil, and a preservative of some sort. There should be some demonstrations at the eggtempera.com link I posted above.

Raw paper is not the ideal surface for e.t, as I understand it, but will work okay if it's a heavyweight stock. It may also need layers of e.t. medium applied first to reduce absorbency, or be shellac'd first.

[carlosranna]

Hey Kan! Great theme you put up here. Let me share a little of what i know. It´s just a little, hehe...

The Tempera can be made of many things. Egg, Vinil, and also some milk protein... I guess it´s called caseine, but i´ll have some hard time to translate this from portuguese to english, so... Sorry!

My teatchers, back in art school, always told us that in order to use the tempera you should be working on a hard surface, because it gets rigid and when the surface moves the painting may crack. Many of the traditional master painted the tempera in wood... I must say i had a hard time with it... I also had a hard time when i gessoed some paper card... But when i used watercolor paper it did just fine.

Anyway, for me what worked the best, contrary to what my teatchers told me, was to use it in "gessoad" (as a metter of fact i used latex...) canvas Tissue... I paint it over a hard wood surface, then i glaze an acrilic medium sort of thing, just to give a coat that protects the picture, then i take it of the wood and stretch it on canvas. Here are the results:

http://carlosrannasketches.blogspot.com/2008/09/dog-portrait-comission.html

http://carlosrannasketches.blogspot.com/2008/03/dog-portrait-comission.html

I do believe that the best thing to do, would be to leave it on the wood, and then frame it. But i´m a cheap bastard and i want to use my wood again on another painting, hehe... By the way, you´ll see that on the poodle pic, the paint cracked a little. It´s because i used a t-shirt tissue as the canvas, and it stretched a lot. I told i´m a cheap bastard, hehehe.... Kidding, i try not to be...

You should have in mind that i´m also using some comercial tempera, and it looks a lot like gouche. But i kept with me some recipies from art college that i knew it would be important some day. Let me start translating and i´ll write it down in a minute.

[carlosranna]

Egg tempera (Temple magro)

Ingredients:

One Egg Yolk (not sure if the name is right, but it´s that yelow part, you know?)
1 part of water
2 or 3 drops of oil carnation

Manufacture:

Take the Yolk away from the rest of the egg, and gently pell of that protection skin of the yolk that holds it all together. Put the same amount of water as of egg yolk, and 2 or 3 drops of oil carnation. Use it with dry pigments over paper or wood panel prepared with gesso.

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Egg and Oil tempera (Temple Gordo)

Ingredients:

One Egg Yolk
1 part of water
1 part of oil

Manufacture:

Take the Yolk away from the rest of the egg, and gently pell of that protection skin of the yolk that holds it all together. Add the oil drop by drop, mixing the result with a spatula knife or something like that. Put the water on the same way. Use it with dry pigments over paper or wood panel prepared with gesso.

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Egg tempera and varnish (Temple Gordo)

Ingredients:

1 Egg Yolk
1 part of varnish (Damar vernish, banana extract, etc...)

Manufacture:

Take the Yolk away from the rest of the egg, and gently pell of that protection skin of the yolk that holds it all together. Add the yolk drop by drop to the varnish, mixing the result with a spatula knife or something like that. Use it with dry pigments over paper or wood panel prepared with gesso.

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Egg tempera, Oil and vinager (whole egg tempera)

Ingredients:

1 whole egg
1 spoon of linseed oil (not sure again if i´m translating it righ... We call it óleo de linhaça. It´s an oil medium....)
4 drops of vinager

Manufacture:

Put the egg, the linseed, and the 4 drops of vinager in a glass. Close it and shake it to mix it all. Pass this mix on a thin tissue or colander. The result is a thin paint. Use it with dry pigments or as a thick paste on paper, canvas or wood panel prepared with gesso.

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Glair

Ingredients:

1 Tranparent rest of the egg that i don´t know the name....

Manufacture

Shake that till it gets thick, like people do to make cakes, you know? If i translate it as it´s written it would be something like beat the "insert right name here" till it transform to snow.... Strange, right? That´s how we say it in Brazil... After that you put it in a glass and leave it there for hours to let the heavier parts of it go down. Decant. Use this one with very thin pigments.

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Well that´s it. Sorry for the technical difficulties in the translation. I wrote it down as it´s in the paper my teatcher gave me back them. If it goes wrong, it´s all her fault, hehehehe.... By the way, these are the eggs tempera. The vinil one i mentioned earlier is made out of white vinil glue. The casein one i don´t know how to do anymore...

Anyway, i do prefer to eat the egg with a bacon and buy a comercial tempera paint and use it on tissue over wood.

Cheers!

[Deadsprite]

i'm a bit of a cheater as i make alot of my materials and modify some commercial products to achieve the affects i want.. one of the things i do when working with and making tempera is use a translucent flat latex base (the stuff they mix vibrant colors with at your hardware store), and i modify it to include the raw pigment 5% starch and 8% plaster and 5% flower. This is my standard "tempera" base if i'm using it with materials that flex or go on an interior wall for fresca paintings.

(incidentally if i increase my plaster to 25% and drop the flower and starch and use white latex paint ... that is my gesso ... quite useful too since it has flexability, sandability, a quick dry time, lightweight and can be drawn on, do in washes with, even paint with oil paints at an 1/8th the cost of gesso.)

if i make it the traditional method and i want to extend the dry time I add a little more I extend the base by using burnt plate oil or a waterbased oil paint oil (burnt plate drastically increases work time unless it is on a porous surface, and the oil extender for waterbased oil paints will add not so much time ... but enough to make it fully blendable) but for blending most tempera artists don't blend on the canvas as they do lots of dry brushing and palette blending.

[Kan Muftić]

Hey Carlos, thanks a bunch, man! I made few attempts which could be found on some of the last pages of my sketchbook thread (click in the signature link).

Cheers,

Khan

[Geir]

Very interresting thread. I have used something called oiltempera myself for many years now. I make myself. This has the eggyolk in it, but instead of water I use boiled linseedoil. Further more I add beeswax (Pre-prepared; melted in warm boiled linseedoil), venetian linseedoil, a few drops or lavander oil, glyserin and something my teacher called blackoil (witch is lead based and self manufactured). This produses something in the middle of oil and acrylic paint. It dryes dustdry from two days to up to 4 or 5 days depending on the pigment and the stroke thikness. When glaced with glace and transperant colors for finilisation, it gets very vibrant. And after varnishing, even more so. It can be a very sticky paint, so you can work very thick. Allthough this depends on each pigment. Some gets more sticky than other, and som dryes more from the inside out than other. Titanium white dry evenly from inside and outside, and yellow orch dryes from the outside and here you can easely get dry membrane with wet paint on the inside witch will take years to dry. But it's a fantastic paint to work with. The picture below is two example of this paint.

When it comes to pure eggtempera, I have yet to try this. But what I now is that it is best to use this on wood prepered with a classic gesso (read to Cennino Cenninis gesso). I've tryed painting on this gesso with my oiltempera, and its fantasic. It binds perfecly with the oils. But I like canvas, and here it's useless. It cracks with the slightest movement of the canvas. The same with oil emulsed gesso. This one actally yellowed extremly to.

[slipp3ry]

yea the tempura back in the day is not the same as the tempura that you buy , for say, elementary school kids.. that stuff is crap.

If you bought some high quality egg tempura then it might be similar

[Deadsprite]

yeah ... the only thing that the tempera on the market is good for is that black ink wash stuff on construction paper. You know, the one where you paint everything but the lines and then when dry you put india ink over everything then when it is also dry you wash off the think from the top of the paint giving you black lines and a nice distressed paint. I do this all the time with my nephews as they love the messy fun of playing with the paint and ink. their mother on the other hand ...

[Chris Bennett]

Tempera has its modern equivalent in acrylic paint. Athough it is not exactly the same it demands the same approach in that the only way to produce gradients in anything like a controlled way is to paint in layers.
I have been using acrylics for about 8 years after being trained as an oil painter and it is only recently I have found myself using techniques that closely resemble tempera painting. Here is an acrylicpainting of mine done a couple of weeks back and I was fascinated how closely it resembles the 'tempera' look, even down to the stillness of the forms which are an outcome of the little hatchings that have built the form layer by layer.

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