Egg Tempera Painting Technique, Tools

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Egg Tempera Tools

Application Devices | Palette | Resources

Application Devices

Brushes
- Housepainter's brushes: Take a good quality as they can loose their hair.
  - To prepare your panels use a 3 inches wide (8 cm).
  - To paint use any size you like. Their hair is soft enough to avoid removing the underpaint. They are good for washes, scrubbing, dabbing, stippling and projections.
- Bristle brushes are not suitable for pure Egg Tempera as they may remove the underpaint, but they are apropriate for Egg Oil Tempera. Choose long hair, which maks the brushes more flexible and softer. Brush strokes remain better, so they are usefull to get a lightly textured underneath paint. But one as to wait longer before to overpaint.
- Sable brushes small sizes from N° 1 to 8, flat square or finepoint, get the best quality for detail and ending work.

Maintenance: Once you have cleaned up your expensive brushes with liquid soap, you can drop some glycerine to preserve their hair.

Knives to mix dry pigments or pasted pigments with your emulsion on the palette. Use palette knives or painting knives as you prefer. Better use plastic ones, as metal can rust and affect the paint.
Natural or artificial sponges & Loofa: Deep into water and squize before using. Load with paint and dab on the panel to create textures and artefacts.
Sand paper and Razor blades:
- To scratch out a layer of paint in a special area to let previous work appears which able an other chance.
- To create textures use rought sand paper or a razor blade (enventualy scratch the edge). Gently scrape the painting to remove a top layer of paint and let partialy apear an uderneath coat of paint of a different color. It gets more interesting if you have impastos.

Palette

Your palette should n't be absorbant or too shiny. A sandblasted piece of glass or marble will be the ideal. You also can use disposable parchment paper palette with blotting-paper underneath to keep the palette humid. It is convenient because the paint remains wet but the oil go through the paper into the blotting paper. The paint gets weaker. For cleaning up, scrape the paint off from your palette with a painting knife and save it for later use. These dried scrapes can be mix again with some egg medium and pigments to provide interesting impastos.

The most apropritate palettes should be in aluminium, china, thin enameled metal sheet

Resources

Brushes by Kremer

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