Painting Sky And Water With Egg Tempera: How To Paint With Egg Tempera, Part III
Parts I and II showed how to prepare egg tempera paint and how to paint with it. Here we’ll demonstrate the progress of two more paintings and show in detail how to paint sky and water with egg tempera.
Painting the “Purple Flowers”
The following slide movie shows the progress of painting “Purple Flowers”, ending with the finished painting. This gives a good sense of how to approach the layering of colors and paint when using egg tempera.
In the slides above you can see how the layering of color on the flower stalks gives them depth and substance and how the petals are gradually built up from dark to light, with the darker color showing through the upper layers of paint, to give them a translucent look.
Painting sky can be a bit tricky, but I find it helpful to visualize it the following way. The sky without clouds is (or should be) a really deep blue. When there’s moisture or dust in the air (and possibly other things too!), these particles scatter light in all directions, throwing light back at the observer. This light coming back from the dust (and other) particles makes the sky look lighter blue.
Egg tempera kind of works in a similar way. To create depth of color, we place down a few layers of deep, dark blue on the painting first. We can think of it as painting that deep blue that we know is behind all those dust particles in the air.
#1 in series demo of "Purple Flowers" egg tempera painting
Then, paint alternate layers of slightly opaque blue and darker blue, by adding a little white gouache to the blue paint to make the lighter blues. This is as though we’re adding our own particles in the air of the painting when we introduce the opaque paint. (Click on images to see in more detail.)
#2 in series demo of "Purple Flowers" egg tempera painting
Repeatedly add dark and light, and sometimes very light, blue layers of egg tempera paint.
#3 in series demo of "Purple Flowers" egg tempera painting
eventually it gives the same appearance of hazy depth on the painting as we perceive when we look at the sky.
The same process works well for painting the far hills to have that hazy look.
#4 in series demo of "Purple Flowers" egg tempera painting
This is really one of the stellar characteristics of egg tempera paint, it allows for the light to travel through the layers of paint in such a way that it can really create the illusion of depth in a painting.
#5 in series demo of "Purple Flowers" egg tempera painting
This last image shows the final version of the upper half of the “Purple Flowers” painting.
Painting the “Geneva Lighthouse”
Below is another slide show movie demonstrating the progress of the painting “Geneva Lighthouse”. Here the same principles were applied to the sky.
In addition you can see how the Geneva lake water was painted. First the darker hues, and then gradually the layers of colors of the water were added until the lighter colors of reflections from the water were finally added. In some places some darker highlights were softly added to the upper layers to show dark patches on the water.
Stay tuned for the final post in this series on DweezelJazz Art blog, “How To Paint With Egg Tempera, Part IV”, to see the progress demos of an additional three egg tempera paintings.
Related posts:
- How To Paint With Egg Tempera, Part II
- Layering Egg Tempera Paint: How To Paint With Egg Tempera, Part IV
- How To Paint With Egg Tempera, Part I
- Egg Tempera Painting Of Sweet Williams
- “Lotus Flower” Egg Tempera Painting
Tags: advantages of egg tempera, Art, Egg Tempera, egg tempera painting, how to paint with egg tempera, Painting, painting with egg tempera
December 26th, 2009 at 02:57
Love the colours in your work, nice and vibrant. Particularly liked the purple flowers, great work well done and thanks for sharing.
December 26th, 2009 at 14:12
Hi Fabrizio,
Thanks for dropping by DweezelJazz Art blog and thank you for your kind words – the purple flowers is one of my favorite paintings too and I chose to put it on my business card.