Egg Tempera workshop 5/3/22

I must admit I was a little apprehensive about using this medium. I expected that it might be very messy and even smelly to work with. My fears were soon allayed. I chose to use as suggested watercolour tube paints. The preparation of the egg and the addition of alcohol was very easy and with the addition of the pigment I was ready to paint. Prior to the workshop we were introduced to some works on a PowerPoint presentation and these dated as early as the 14th Century. I was very interested to know more as I believe some of Turners watercolours were created in tempera and I wanted to see how the properties of the tempera would work on creating similar skies that he produced. I was so pleasantly surprised by the results. I decided to use a limited palette of colours, ultramarine, lemon yellow and alizarin crimson and rose madder. These would suffice in testing out translucency and overlaying. Having attended an exhibition of Turners work in Bridport a couple of years ago I’d purchased a sheet of watercolour paper that was from Cuthbert Mill. It was of the consistency that Turner used and is highly textural. I want to see how this might work with the tempera. Examples of Turners watercolours are below.

Some of the above images are from google. Turner really had a thick texture to his ground. His father was reported to prepare his canvases and would use rabbit glue and other additives. Although you can’t see very well there was a good sheen on the surface of the practice pieces below. The first two are with ordinary 140lb watercolour paper. The last two are on the kind of paper that Turner used. You can see the heavy grain and this really works well.

The texture in the paper really works for some drybrush techniques as in the last image. I could also scratch into the paper nicely. The tempera is really so versatile and I found it really good to work with. It was easy to mix up and with the alcohol additive it will last a little longer than I thought as long as the container is small and airtight.