Friday, December 03, 2021
Secret of tempera’s pleasing properties is how egg yolk interacts with pigment
Ars Technica: Tempera is a painting medium that has been used to decorate everything from early Egyptian sarcophagi to India's rock-cut temples. The medium was particularly popular with medieval and early Renaissance artists until it was eventually supplanted by oil-based paints. But while there has been a great deal of research on the chemistry of oil paints, tempera has been largely neglected in the scientific literature, according to researchers at the Sorbonne University in France.
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5 comments:
Here's the thing, if the binder in the paint is going to be egg, doesn't that mean that the egg is gonna go bad? Like yes some paint can obviously go bad and smell like absolute garbage if it goes rotten or bad, but wouldn't it mean that the egg paint would smell worse? And like, back in the age of embalming people in sarcophagi, what did they do if the paint went bad? Would they put up with the odor? How long did it take for them to use up all the paint so they wouldn't have to worry about it going to waste and did they microdose paint every time they needed it so they wouldn't worry about it? And like, how far off are the binders we're using in paint today? AND where did the egg come from?? And if we're really asking the big questions, what came first-- the chicken or the egg?
I think its so cool to read articles about new mediums. Egg yolk is definitely not something that I would have thought about reading or something that would be used in paint! I think that it is interesting how there is all sorts of things being studied. I wonder how the science behind using tempura paint with egg yolks can be used in art. What sort of art works would specifically call for egg yolks to be used? also , is this kind of paint even necessary? I wonder about the longevity of this kind of paint. Like the other commenter said, wouldn’t the paint just rot? That could be an interesting theatre piece, where the set rots as time goes by. It is a little disgusting, but I think that could be super cool. I think that there is so many different types of things you can do once you study and learn about new techniques and materials. I feel like more things open up.
I'm not well versed in different paints and artistic mediums but I thought if there were two types of paint I somewhat understood it'd be acrylic and tempera. I am surprised to learn that tempera has egg yolks as binder partially because, as Monica said, it's perishable, and partially because does the yellowness of the yolk not affect the color output? I would think people would aim for white or colorless binders to preserve the deepness of the pigments. You can even see in their color swatch between with egg yolk binder vs with water binder that the pigments in the water binded paint are darker, a little less yellow toned, and darker overall. I was also not aware you could crosshatch with paint? In my brain cross hatching is only possible with a non-liquid medium like a pastel or pencil. How does that differ from overlay? Is it just distinguished by the size of the brush and the brush strokes? So many new questions and interesting things to think about in the process of paint making.
I knew milk paint was a thing, but wow I never thought that egg could be used as a pigment binder! Though I guess if it works for binding baked goods, why not paint as well? I’m also wondering how efficient egg yolk paint is. I could see it being used for smaller portraits or paintings, but I imagine it would take a lot of egg to create enough paint to do anything on a larger scale - so probably not reasonable to use in theatre scenery applications. Milk paint gets pretty gross when it goes bad, and like others have said, I wonder if egg yolk paint would also get weird if left unused for too long? Cause eggs being left out spoil pretty fast don’t they? I also don’t quite understand why this paint would be so hard to do color mixing with. Maybe I don’t know enough about paints to understand.
I always laugh internally when i first hear about a strange medium and then usually and deservedly get clowned when I realize that they absolutely exist and absolutely do something interesting on their own. A lot of mediums have existed for a while and thus get a lot more boost and acclaim because they are known and widespread because they have been used and developed for so long above newer possible materials. I’m also always surprised by how much time is spent trying to replicate or understand old pigments. Did Individual artists always make their own? How different were their recipes? I imagine it was harder to create country wide standards like we see in our class material list; for example winsor-newton watercolors. As in with some of my previous points, this does remove artists from a bit of a process which if not significant is at least interesting to me.
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