Tempera Notebook

Working with egg tempera gives my work breath before the egg becomes paint. From the hen's natural life-giving process that produces an egg, I can mix an ideal binder. This binder holds fast pigments, some that originate from the earth and some created by modern alchemists, to a panel sourced from once-living timber. This blog post reminds the reader and me of the beautiful biological complexity that gives egg tempera artwork life.

Test color swatches are great to make any time you have new materials. When you make test swatches, you create a tool that allows you to see all your color options at once. And, with a color swatches on white and black grounds, you can compare the transparency of different colors. You can make test swatches with any medium. In this post, I will share my process of making color swatches in egg tempera.

In this post, I have shared a few definitions that readers may find useful. Many of these definitions have been adapted from Simon Jennings’ Artist’s Color Manual.