EGG TEMPERA FROM START TO FINISH, by Fergus A Ryan

hello this is Fergus Ryan welcome to my presentation on how I paint an egg tempera painting from start to finish up to the late 15th century artists like Sandro Botticelli were painting in a medium of dry color pigments mixed with egg yolk and water by the mid 1400s the new medium of oil paint was being introduced and for a time artists used a mixture of egg yolk and oil known as tempura grasa as oil became the standard medium the techniques of egg tempera were gradually lost but egg tempera was brought to prompt prominence again in the 20th century by artists such as Howard Pyle and Andrew Wyeth whose tempera winter 1946 is shown here here I will take you through my own egg tempera painting process we'll begin with making the special ground for the egg tempera painting which is called true gesso this is not the so called acrylic gesso which is unsuitable as the egg tempera does not form a strong bond with the acrylic and may simply peel off its slicker surface next the panel will be prepared with sizing to seal it and then coat it with several layers of gesso as we will explain in a moment aching the egg tempera paint itself is the easiest part and a pleasure in itself and finally I will take you step by step as I build up the complex egg tempera surface of one of my large paintings entitled Islanders first then making the gesso in this session I will be preparing two large panels of about 2 feet by 4 feet each or about 61 by 122 centimeters the process begins with the binder that holds the gesso together which is either gelatin which is used in cooking or more traditionally rabbit skin glue as shown here it comes in flakes that will be dissolved in order I made two bowls of warm glue with the rabbit skin granules one for sizing the panel and a larger Bowl for making the white gesso bowl one shown here is for the sizing into this bowl I poured three cups of water and slowly added three tablespoons of the blue flakes and stirred the glue will not dissolve properly until the water is warmed I place the bowl on a saucepan with about five centimeters of water 2 inches heated to a moderate temperature I think I used a setting of about four or five on my electric hob here a double boiler could be used to the blue must not get too warm and certainly not above 57 degrees Celsius or 135 degrees Fahrenheit or as will change the structure of the material I usually kept mine around 110 degrees Fahrenheit or 43 degrees Celsius next the larger bowl which will be used for making the gesso into this second bowl I poured 6 cups of water and slowly added 9 tablespoons of the rabbit skin glue experience tells me this should be adequate for the two large panels which will be coated eight times on the front and three or four perhaps on the back to prevent warping the glue was dissolved on the saucepan in the same way as the first bowl and when both were cooled I put them in the refrigerator overnight in the morning the glue is firm and hard like a strong jelly by breaking the surface in the thumb test I can check the consistency if the break sides are too glossy and smooth then more water is needed the sides of the break should have some obvious texture the mixture is cool now and will liquify again quite easily when it's seated I'm using a cooking thermometer to keep an eye on the temperature which once again I will allow to rise to about ten degrees Fahrenheit of 43 degrees Celsius gesso is prepared with powdered chalk or gypsum in fact gesso is the Italian word for gypsum there are various kinds gypsum from Italy or chalk from France the chalk is regarded by some as being a little bit better this is a tub of writing from Robertsons in London but the powder is available from various suppliers Co Nielsen's Cinelli a brownies and so on so now I'm adding the gesso powder to the warm glue in the larger bowl I've wand the solidified glue mixture by placing the bowl on my saucepan containing water and to the warm glue mixture I gradually added 9 cups of the white powder in order to prevent dry lumps forming it mustn't be added too quickly the chalk powder has to be allowed float through the sieve like snow falling on the worn blue while stirring it all the time to cause a to dissolve this is certainly easier at the beginning when it's still very light you can also add some titanium white pigment if you wish to improve the whitening whiteness of the surface further but I usually don't find that necessary and in this case I added only about a spoonful here's my temperature check thermometer this one is marked in Fahrenheit and I'm watching the temperature of the gesso all the time I'm adding the powder to it so I'm once again keeping it below 135 degrees Fahrenheit or 57 Celsius I have to strain out any undissolved lumps that may form in the gesso mixture I poured the whole mixture into a second Bowl through a mesh sieve one more time just to make sure it's as uniform and smooth as possible so when the geser was fully dissolved the texture should be like light cream it's probably best to allow this to settle for some time before using it I actually started the application of the mixture to the panel the next day the mixture will solidify again as it cools and can simply be real iqua fide in maybe 10 minutes or so by placing it on the saucepan or double boiler so now preparing the panel itself I'm preparing two large MDF panels which are nine millimeters thick as you can see here if required they can be cut up into smaller panels later for smaller paintings first then I sized the MDF panels with the warm glue mixture in Bowl one using here a three and a half inch gelling brush made by liquitex but any similar large soft brush should do both sides of the panel need to be sized for protection as well as the edges during this process I support the panels on a number of mugs while I'm sizing and jassu I leave the to glue sized panels overnight to dry naturally the warm gesso mixture can now be applied to the MDF panel you could also use on tempered masonite but that product is becoming somewhat more difficult to obtain or you can use wood as they did in the Renaissance period and poplar is a good choice for smaller paintings to start I cover the back with a couple of layers of the gesso though further layers can be added later on painting the gesso like this on both sides ensures that the warping of the panel will be minimized though actually I've really had very little difficulty with that because I place these panels into quite strong frames and the frames are going to make sure any remaining slight warping will be eliminated so then I'm going to apply up to eight coats on the painting side and here then are my two completed true gesso panels they are a beautiful object to behold I have to say and the panel's here have been sanded after being coated with an orbital sander that is one of those flat ones that oscillates or vibrates not a rotating sander which will make gouges in the surface anyway the result of the sanding is a beautifully silky smooth surface it's like a sheet of white marble like chalk so now my panel is ready for the egg tempera painting to begin now for the fun part which is making the paint medium itself and mixing the paint so after cracking some free-range eggs though any fresh eggs should do I pour out the white carefully into a small bowl it will be discarded as it's not part of the painting process though it may appear in a meal in the kitchen soon I expect I roll the yolk sack carefully around on a square of kitchen tissue to remove all remaining waste that's adhering to it and then I roll it again on my hand and now for the tricky part which is picking up the yolk sack very carefully with a careful pinch between my thumb and forefinger and piercing it with a knife to allow it the the yellow yolk to fall into a small glass this is much easier with fresh eggs as later on the sack tends to weaken in order X I'm using two eggs today for today's painting preparation so to finish making the egg medium I add distilled water as a rough guide it's two parts of egg yolk to one part of water although experience will show you that different eggs have different consistencies here you may notice I've made a small mark on the glass just to help me estimate how much water I'm adding it's not necessary to use distilled water although it is pure and here's a secret free tip you can get to still water for nothing from your dehumidifier if you have one so just a final stirring of the egg and water to make the egg emulsion and this is our paint medium and we're ready now to add it to the pigment to make our paint the colors used in egg tempera come in the form of powder and together they have quite an exotic appearance on my palace to make the paint I take just a small amount with my palette knife of the pigment and place it on my glass Palace here I'm using raw umber I picked up a source in ASEAN and Provence in France that is an amazing place from which a lot of our ochre colors come and the ground itself is literally ochre of various colors next a paste is made just by adding a few drops of water with an eyedropper and mixing it with a palette knife this is called tempering finally I add the egg medium approximately the same value as the pile of tempered paint and mix it all together with my palette knife so it's really very simple and takes only a few seconds to mix the paint oh one more thing just to keep the egg from developing any later mold I add a few drops of white vinegar into my egg emulsion when I make it so now it's ready for use and we're ready to begin the painting here's a sort of family photo of my pigments waiting to show off their true colors with my newly prepared true gesso panel on the easel eager to go I've placed the beautiful jars of powdered pigment from all over the world around the edge of my large glass Palace which I've sat on top of an old computer table here with casters the palette is made of a thick piece of MDF board I think it was about 2 centimeters or maybe 3/4 of an inch and then there's a sheet of mid gray paper and on top of that finally a sheet of glass and I edged the whole thing with wood raised slightly above the last surface to keep everything from falling off this palette is about 20 inches by 30 inches and that's my new true gesso panel protruding in on the left so now I'm ready and eager to start my new painting these are the initial broad strokes to lay in the first layers egg tempera unlike oil dries almost immediately and the later finishing textures will be painted with a tiny brush in luminous transparent crosshatch strokes finished with some opaque highlights egg tempera can be glazed it can be scratched through wiped apply it layer by layer with makeup sponges but it must never be applied thickly or it will crack off and peel away disastrously here's an early stage detail on the right side of the panel this is at the end of my first day of painting the grass textures are being indicated in this early stage by patches of layered and crossed touch touches of various colors and here I used to revert cobalt blue raw umber yellow ochre maples yellow which is a little opaque and then a beautiful pinkish purple color called cadmium red purple the houses are indicated to here with a black called mineral black which I got in Russia on and those are my first touches and of course titanium white although I tend to keep the use of opaque titanium light for later on in the process so you can see there's a long way to go to Liz's refined enough to look real but hey not bad for the end of day 1 the process of painting the grass and vegetation is a series of layers of warm and cool transparent and opaque dots dashes blotches strokes until I'm happy with how developed the texture is and how credible the illusion of reality this is optical mixing where a general impression of color overall color is produced by tiny touches of many individual colors egg tempera requires a patient almost meditative approach and really I don't think about how long this will take I just do whatever is needed until I have a sense that it's done the quality of watery light is important here for my purposes as the loneliness of the scene is emphasised by this Contras your viewpoint that is something painted against the light or backlit this detail is about one third of the width of the full painting and about half the height now moving left to the center of the painting I very roughly indicated the forms of a central group of abandoned houses on the island with the first loose indication of sea and distant headland in the background as you can see it's all fairly rough at this stage and the final image will be a great deal more unified and detailed than it is here indicating the grass's is a very slow process of weaving the textures in crosshatch strokes until I feel that the surface is real and cohesive it feels extraordinarily like I'm weaving the earth itself in my hands creative act out of the colors on my palette this central detail once again a shows about a third of the width of the painting and half the height I've been working on this painting now for just a few days and it will take several weeks to complete although I could work on those hillside grasses for months I think I enjoy doing the grasses more than anything moving then down to the bottom left these are the abandoned houses in that section of the picture and I've been developing the stonework on the gables of the nearest house the ones further back are just loosely indicated at this point and first I drew the stones with a fine brush and paying attention to the perspective line of the horizontals moving up towards the horizon and here I used the mineral black again and then I'd lazed over the stones to unify the surface with a light trance and greenish-gray cutter which was a beautiful gray I got in Russia on called art was then I highlighted some stones with white I'm also working as you can see on the group of foreground rocks and grasses and the grass here is already quite a bit more developed than the parts we saw earlier on in fact let's have a close-up look at an early stage of building up the textures of the grass and to note here that one of the handy features of egg tempera is that the surface can be scratched into very lightly to indicate very fine lines that are quite difficult to paint with the brush these then can be glazed over again so they're not too sharp and that will unify the surface so let's have a look at another of my paintings that's a section of a large finished painting called tide pool which you can see on my website and this shows the way scratching and glazing can add detail and subtlety to the finished painting still the technique should be used very sparingly the light-dark value changes are greatly reduced in the distance and color approaches that of the intervening sky I say the sky is intervening because as Israel Hirschberg pointed out to me during a painting program in Italy the sky is not something that goes down behind the mountain the sky is the atmosphere itself and it comes down in front of the mountain and the sky basically begins at our nose and everything receding into the distance is enveloped in a greater and greater amount of sky so that things move towards the color and value range of the sky itself here at the background headland is receiving a few surface details but the minimal variation in color ensures that they retreat into the distance in fact this headland will be glazed and selectively and worked on until everything is unified and softened and moved back as it is here about five kilometers the distance you can see to that the sea surface will need to receive a lot more attention before it looks convincing so I worked on this painting for quite a number of weeks and here you can see my large egg tempera painting is finally finished this is the haunting site of the abandoned village on Great Blasket Island the remaining Islanders were evacuated to the mainland in 1953 there were no roads on the island and electricity never reached the Irish speaking community in what was Europe's westernmost village the windows and doors of these crumbling houses seemed to me to look longingly towards the mainland and vainly so like an abandoned dog waiting for its owner to return many of the Blasket Island descendants lived today in Springfield Massachusetts and some Islanders still live on the Dingle Peninsula in the background looking across to their childhood Island homes so thank you for joining me on this egg tempera journey from start to finish happy painting you

Channel: Fergus Ryan

Views: 125,127

Keywords: Tempera (Visual Art Medium), painting Landscapes, Fergus A Ryan, Irish art, Painting (Visual Art Form), egg tempera technique, egg tempera painting, egg tempera painting techniques

Id: fTYhS91rIUE

Length: 22min 7sec (1327 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 22 2015