I'm taking this FANTASTIC class this semester called The Contemporary Icon with Bob Baart. Throughout the semester we learn all the traditional techniques for making religious icons - we prepare our own sizing and gesso, prepare our own boards, make egg tempera from pigment and egg yolk, and we even get to work with gold leaf and learn various gilding/tooling techniques. I am a HUGE fan of religious icons - early christian art is one of my favorite things, and so I jumped at the opportunity to take the class.
For the past three weeks we've been preparing practice boards and learning how to make all the grounds, as well as stretching and coating paper for silverpoint drawings. This week we got to make our first batches of egg tempera and do a practice painting on a practice panel. We were given two images to chose from - a detail of draped cloth and this ball in a bowl, and limited to building our palette from three (really two) colors - ultramarine blue, umber, and white.
I have never been good at rendering, and I have never taken a formal painting class, and so I'm actually really really proud of this little painting. I know it kind of sucks, and yeah, the bowl is supposed to be white, but I think it's awesome. Probably only the second or third still life i've ever worked from. I can't wait to work on my final piece - this weekend I hope to finish developing the imagery so I can get down to it soon. Stay tuned for more awesome stuff from this class!
4 comments:
top notch, ellen! i've never done egg tempera myself, but i have loomed over many a shoulder to watch and it seems pretty difficult. i love me some cross hatching, though...so I think I could get into it.
are you guys doing the sizing the authentic way, for silver point...ie rabbit skin glue? THAT i've done, sans the rabbit skin thankfully...we used house paint. go figure.
YES! we do it alll the old fashioned way. I guess you can use methyl cellulose instead if the rabbit-skin glue eeks you out, but personally I don't see much difference between glue from farm rasied rabbits and glue from various body parts of other farm raised animals...
But yeah, we use rabbit skin glue for the ground for silver point, as well as for applying the initial layer to our egg tempera panels, and it also goes into the gesso ground we make for the panels.
You used white house paint as your silverpoint medium? I can see that working well actually because if you rub a metal ring (a soft metal though) on a white wall you leave a mark and that mark is the metal leaving behind traces, which is exactly what silverpoint drawing is! So yeah, why not? The lady I do an internship with uses regular gesso ground out of the tub for her silverpoint medium and that works fine too - but I really loved the smooth surface of the ground we made. We also stretched the paper before applying it.
And thanks baby boo!
rattfink, it is fabbfink!!!wtg elle!
oops, that's meefink, mommfink
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