I thought maybe some of you would like to know how my tempera technique developed.
In october 2016 I didn’t yet quite understand how the medium works. I had tried it between 2010 and 2012 as a supplement to oil paint, but never with watercolour. In fact, before 2016 I rarely – if ever – did anything with watercolours either.
Click the images for a large view!
The image on the left is one of my first tentative attempts at working with tempera and watercolour – with some black ink added just for fun. It was painted during spring 2016. I first painted the whole thing with watercolour, and then did the more plastic-looking parts of the face with titanium white tempera paint – and later added some watercolour on top of that. The effect is ghastly the way I planned it – but at that point I didn’t yet understand how to get any further.
In the image on the right I have already managed to achieve an oil paint-like solidity. The method? Work it like an oil painting, simply. Add layer after layer until you’re satisfied. Tempera is very very flexible in that respect. It’s also opaque as a very thin layer, so you can do quite a bit of reworking even on paper. I found this out just by testing it myself: I knew that as long as the paper holds and I don’t add anything except water to the paint, I can do pretty much anything I like. I recommend this method. There’s nothing more satisfying than finding things out on your own.
A few of the images in the surrealist gallery have no tempera in them. You can probably spot them fairly easily: they look less massive, less solid than the ones with tempera. Most of them are lower down on the gallery page – except one, Dragon mask I. With that one I somehow made do with just watercolour and gouache despite having just fallen in love with tempera.