Egg, Tempered

I'm very behind on my blog and I could (should?) backdate this post but whatever.

There's not a whole lot to post about, last month and this month I feel like I have been in a fog and time is moving so so quickly.

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I HAVE BEEN PAINTING- I'm working on the series Carey and I are doing together and am finally almost on the home stretch but I can't post anything yet.

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A couple of weeks ago I finished my quail egg still life painting in my class.  It took 5 weeks.

8x10 egg tempera on Ampersand Claybord.

This is my very first egg tempera painting.

Doug Safronek (the teacher) said some really, really nice things to me on this painting.

When I did the gradient in the back (it was grayscale before i added the black and white) he said that's as difficult as it gets in tempera. (It wasn't easy.) He also said this is a very advanced painting and he was impressed with it.  Others in the class also liked it.  That was a nice compliment from such an accomplished artist as Doug is.

Here are some progress shots... this painting was really ugly for a long time.

__PRESENT__PRESENT

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I spent too much money at Kremer Pigments in September... but I'm done.  Probably for life, to be honest. I got the starter set of pigments, then went back for some secondaries...... and then someone in the class had an AMAZING SET!! I wanted to go back a third time and get a good orange and a few cobalts, but those are very expensive pigments.  This set had them!  The cost of the set was about the same as buying the individual colors I wanted.  I love it and will have it for the rest of my life.  

Doug still has pigment jars that his teacher gave to him in 1984!! That's how long this stuff lasts.

So I think it was a good investment.  I like egg tempera and will keep working in it.

These pigments can be made into oil paint or pastels as well, if I really wanted to do that. 

I wish Kremer sold pigments in these nice 30ml jars.

The picture below is the set I made from the starter set and my supplement pigments.

I will likely add some of the set colors into the smaller jars to have everything in the small set.  

The large set is HEAVY.

I am not quite sure why, perhaps it is the lack of a binder, but a few pigments when mixed together dry don't have the chroma I would expect. Mixed orange, as well as the phthalo turquoise. I have that pigment in oil and it is dark but when slightly tinted is quite bright... not so with the powder. I was surprised. The convenience tint and the straight pigment are next to each other in the center of the middle row above.

Mixing in tempera is more optical than palette mixing, although i do a little of that as well, but less so than with oils. The application is really, really different.  5 extremely thin layers are better than one thicker layer.

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I like this sign at the League: