Tempera Painting and Shield Making

[dubsartur]

There was a call for posts about creative projects on Exilian's social media

Over on Mastodon I am posting about my experiments in shield making and tempera painting (painting with powdered colours in water-based binders or tempers such as egg yolk, egg white, gum arabic, or hide glue).

If this is mentioned in a monthly update, please refer to me as "a member" not by my username.  Because I talk about a variety of things on here, I would like to keep it slightly separate from the Mastodon account which is theoretically professional (although has some bad mental health talk etc.)

[Jubal]

Ooh, the paints look interesting! It's the kind of project I wish I had a bit more time, energy, and space for. Can you mix colours much with this sort of painting to any useful effect, or does that not work with the technique?

[dubsartur]

Tempera painting involves a lot of mixing colours (especially lightening and darkening colours with white or black) but many pigments before industrial chemistry are reactive.  Sometimes that means that specific combinations don't mix well, other times that they are not lightfast (eg. indigo / woad, brazilwood / sappanwoood) or airfast.  Many of those are the toxic pigments like orpiment (As₂S₃), lead white (2PbCO₃·Pb(OH)₂), and verdigris which I am not using (I may try verdigris-and-saffron ink).

Because aqueous media dry quickly, there was usually an emphasis on flat colours or layering highlights and shadows over a base colour (whereas industrial oil paints or watercolours lend themselves to blending colours while they are still wet).

Talk with some photos and sources here

Not a lot of words in me, this post took two hours

[dubsartur]

I geeked out with someone locally who has done some tempera painting.  She agrees that the binder does not matter too much once you have two or three options that work well on different surfaces.

Painting with egg white or yolk binder is characteristic of the middle ages, but ancient painters seem to have preferred gum arabic, hide glue, and wax.  One friend wondered if that is because eggs are good to eat, so painting with egg requires a certain margin between standard of living and survival. 

[Jubal]

I'd have intuitively expected that producing gum, wax, or hide glue would represent more resource investment than egg per unit binder, though maybe I'm naive on that front. you can eat eggs, but you can also spend the considerable time it takes to make those other substances on food production of some kind (or if someone else is making it, you're spending some surplus of your own which you could be spending on food).

I'm glad you have someone in your area doing similar things - with crafts it's especially good to have people around.

[dubsartur]

It might just be a just-so story! 

Gum arabic is pretty easy to collect, it drips off bushes growing in the desert when their bark is damaged.  You do have to find the trees which live in rough conditions (and learn how much to damage them for optimal gum production without killing them or stunting them). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gum_Arabic_exuding.jpg

To make hide glue you just cook down bits of skin, fish bladder, and connective tissue into a jelly.  So you need a fire and water and a pot.

I have heard that beehives with replaceable battens are recent, and that getting the honey or wax out of traditional basketry or coiled rope hives does a lot of damage to the nest.

[dubsartur]

Another friend finds that egg yolk dries very fast in the last hot dry environment he painted in (Arizona).  And because its made of the same things as the hair or celulose brushes, once it dries it can't be gotten out. 

So something with a slower drying time would have advantages in Egypt.