Welcome to

by Linda Carson

big black pig studio
98 King St. N., Waterloo Ontario Canada
www.bigblackpig.com

Egg Tempera

As I say so often in the studio, "Paint is just coloured glue."

In egg tempera paint, the glue is the yolk of common chicken eggs. Did you expect the egg white would make a better glue? I did. After all, it's more transparent than yolk. But it's lumpy and stringy and tends to froth up. Egg yolk may be yellow but that fades away. It's also smooth and creamy. As anyone who has ever tried washing dried egg out of a bowl can testify, it's also a darned tough adhesive.

Forms of egg tempera have been used around the world for centuries. Until the development of oil painting during the Renaissance, egg tempera on panel was the mainstay of easel painting in Europe. It's an opaque, satin-finish paint that dries quickly and cleans up with water. There's no time for smooth blending, so egg tempera is usually painted in short hatched brushstrokes or other broken colour techniques. The surface is a little tender for a few days, but it toughens up and lasts literally for centuries.

Because the paint is somewhat brittle, the best support for egg tempera is a rigid panel with a gesso ground. The solvent is water. Egg tempera dries in minutes, and toughens up permanently in a few weeks. You may varnish the finished painting. Frame it without glass. Don't hang any painting in direct sunlight.

Today egg tempera is a favourite medium amongst hyper-realists, wildlife artists and medievalists. And they say politics makes strange bedfellows? If you really shop around, you can find commercially-prepared egg tempera. But would you respect yourself in the morning? There's a mystique to making your own, and you can't beat the price. An egg or two will see you through a day's work.

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Loosely translated, that means:
"Please don't copy this material or redistribute it in some other form, for any reason. This is my livelihood."