Silliness, art, and eggs

Do you ever put off — and work up a big dread for — something that turns out to be simple, even pleasant? I’ve been doing that for the last 10 days with my venture into egg-tempera painting. Not venturing.

I had an excuse, if that counts for anything. The powdered pigments arrived the day The Wandering Monk and I started on the last (knock wood) really grueling project. I wanted to wait to give full attention to paint making. I did mix up rabbit-skin glue and French chalk and prepared a gesso board, a process that took a few days. So I wasn’t putting off the paint making for any silly reason.

Except I really was.

Eggs are icky. I cringe at the idea of handling raw eggs. By the time I was 10 years old I’d figured out how to break them one-handedly, not because I was some super-dextrous show-offy cook, but because that lessened the number of fingers that might come in contact with slime.

Yes, I am an egg wuss.

And making tempera begins with separating the yoke from the white of an egg. No getting around it. This separating goes beyond the old “tip the yolk from one half of the shell to the other” method. It begins like that, but the process finishes like this:

Photo source

Hold the egg in one palm, gently slip it onto the other, wash and dry the first palm, slip the egg back, wash and dry the second palm, repeat, repeat, repeat (and pick out the gross bits we used to call rooster sperm) until the yolk is completely stripped of all white. Meanwhile hope it doesn’t break and ooze all over your hands.

Of course when I actually quit procrastinating this afternoon and did the deed, it was simple and way less disgusting than I expected. Kind of fun, even.

Once the yolk was dry, I expected the next stage to be the gross one: attempt to hold the yolk by its sac while piercing it with a small knife to let its innards drain into a bowl. Again, that wasn’t as bad as I expected.

The cool thing about this was the eggs. Ten days ago I blogged that I had fresh eggs from a neighbor’s chickens. For this to work without the yolk coming apart on you, your eggs have to be really fresh. Mine were nearly two weeks old. I knew that leaving them unwashed (which I did) was a good way to extend their life, but I still expected them to act like old eggs.

Instead I was struck by how firm and fresh and easy-to-handle that yolk was after so much time. Still bright, screaming yellow, no problem to handle. After just a bit of palm-to-palm, I knew it would never come apart on me. You couldn’t do that with storebought eggs, which have only a day or two of tempera-making life in them by the time you buy them.

Impressive eggs, neighbors.

Anyhow, that went well. Then I mixed the yolk with a couple teaspoons of water and slightly less of cider vinegar. And that was that: there’s the emulsion, the binding agent, that gets mixed with the powdered pigments to form the basis of egg-tempera painting.

Not everybody uses vinegar. I gather there’s a trade-off between keeping the emulsion fresh (which vinegar does for a couple weeks) and having the destructive qualities of acid in your paint. Since I’ll no doubt be doing more procrastinating, I went with the preservative.

Next step, take a half teaspoon of dry pigment (burnt sienna, in this case) and systematically begin dropping the egg emulsion into it and mashing with a stiff brush until it’s a thick, creamy liquid.

So far still going okay …

Once you have the creamy paint base, you can use water to make it as thin as you like. The first layers on a piece of artwork are usually thin, with thicker mixes applied as you go. I haven’t gotten that far yet.

They say egg-tempera is more like brush-and-ink than like paint. So I started off just doodling. They (whoever they are ) are right. It’s like ink. I’ll attempt something multi-colored and more sophisticated soon. We have a week’s pause before the next phase of the house project, so I’ll have a harder time finding procrastinational excuses.

So far scribbles are all I have to show for two weeks of procrastination and half an hour of egg-tech. Gotta begin somewhere, though. And Ava sure loved having all that egg white on her kibble.

Yeah, it doesn’t look like much. But hey, I made my own paint!