[Scriptoris] Egg Tempera?

[letebts]

Siobhan,

My looooong bit about paints and brushes:

All paints on the market are nothing more than a pigment and a binder with
or without additives for various reasons.

Pigments can come from the earth (the siennas,the umbers, the cobalts, etc.)
or from processes (lapis lasuli > ultramarine) and from dye colors like the
aniline dyes that came into being in the 1800's.

Mix, say burnt sienna (toasted dirt from Sienna, Italy) with linseed oil and
a binder and you get oil paints. Mix burnt sienna with the liquid from
inside an egg yolk's membrane and you get egg tempera. For blue, purple, and
the "cooler" colors, you might want to use the weep that comes from
dry-beaten egg whites that have been allowed to sit for hours and the weep
decanted from under the froth. Mix burnt sienna with a milk derivitive and
you get casein. Mix burnt sienna with gum arabic and you can get watercolor
or gouache. Mix burnt sienna and a plastic medium and you get acrylic
paints. That's it in a generic nutshell, or in Ansteorra, in an acorn. ;-)

A really good catalog you might want to send for is from
Kremer Pigments, Inc. 228 Elizabeth St. NY, NY 10012
Pho: 212-219-2394 Orders 800-995-5501
www.kermer-pigmente.com
email: kremerinc at aol.com

You can even buy egg tempera in tubes like gouache. I stocked it in
Calligraphy Heaven when it was an actual storefront. Never tried the tubes
myself.  Too involved with traditional watercolor, gouache, and inks on
paper.

As to the business about brushes, what you have heard is right. It all
depends on the painter, the purpose and the surface. In the mundane world,
the saying is "Fake hair for fake paints (acrylic) and real hair for real
paints."

What you are spending your money for when you buy brushes is the tip. It
should come to a knife edge or a needle point when swished in water (to
remove a liquid put on the brush and dried before shipment) and flicked
(untouched and unpaletted, i.e. stroked on an edge or surface) dry. Hold the
brush tip to the light and look closely for misaligned hair and others that
stick out from the preferred shape of a chisel or a point.

Sable brushes have skyrocketed in price because of all the bruhaha about
wearing fur coats. Less coats, less sable brushes. The sable tails are what
constitute material for brushes. Male sable tail hair is much longer than
the female. Most of the sable brushes you find are female.

Sable has the peculiar conformation of having a "belly" that swells minutely
at the base of the hair; other hairs are like extruded toothpaste. Sable
also has a "spring-y" quality that makes the brush bounce back to a straight
form when lightly pressed on a surface. Squirrel and the rest don't. As an
aside, "camel hair" brushes don't come from camels; the brushes were
originally sold by a man by that name.

Speaking about brands, Winsor-Newton, a British company, has a
top-of-the-line sable brush called "Series 7." There is a cheaper, but
excellent, version of sable brushes by a woman whose name is Silver, hence
the "Silver Brush Co." The ferrule is of a single piece of non-corrosive
metal, has no seams, is double-crimped, and the part nearest the base of the
hairs is rounded so that it doesn't cut the hairs when is use.
And another aside, "sableine" is not cheap sable or a mix of it; it's
totally a substitute for sable and lacks the finer qualities of sable.

Bottom line: buy the best tools you can. An old painter's saying:
"The poor workman blames his tools." That dates from the Renaissance, I am
told. If you buy good tools and good paints, you won't have to be "fighting"
all the time to get things to come out right. Technique comes with
experience.

I could go on and on, but I probably have said more than you want to know
anyway! Sorry. Tools, media and technique have been a passion of mine for a
long, long time. I would love to have taken that week-long class Serena took
on how to make your own medieval paints. She has tomes of notes on it.

Alright, fellow scribes, throw in your "goodies" of info. Let's help our new
scribe (as well as each other). The more info the merrier!!

Lete


on 1/30/03 9:10 PM, Donna Hufford at dhufford at earthlink.net wrote:

> Greetings all
>
> I was wondering if anyone out there has any experience with egg tempera.  It
> is something I have really been wanting to try but am having difficulty
> finding definitive information for the actual mixture of egg yolk and
> pigment.
>
> Thank you
>
> Siobhan
> Northkeep
>
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