Table of Contents

Dark red text has been formatted as certain heading types. To ensure the table of contents is rendered correctly, make sure any edits to these fields does not change their heading type.

2021.[Month].[Day], [hh]:[mm][am/pm]

[Lake Painting Field Notes]

Name: Elizabeth Branscum

Date and Time:

2021.[6].[3], [09]:[12][am]

Location: Apartment Dining Table

Subject: Lake Painting

Though I’ve left my cochineal to dry overnight, it’s still noticeably damp and sticky, but I am able to scrape it off the coffee filters in pretty big chunks.

Separate an egg to make tempera and glair. I use Professor Smith’s method, using my hands to remove the white from the yolk and periodically patting my hands and the yolk dry. I’m not quite able to get the sack enclosing the yolk completely off the first try, so I separate another egg.

Next I use my provided dropper to add approximately 20 mL of unfiltered tap water to the vial containing 2g gum Arabic and stir vigorously. Leave to sit for a few minutes in between stirs. After about five or seven minutes of occasional stirring, the gum Arabic appears to be incorporated into the water.

Next I beat my egg whites by hand with a whisk. It’s interesting to watch them transform from clear to foamy – first they get bubbly, then more gradually opaque. When I have relatively stiff peaks forming, I leave it to sit and make my sample card.

When we’re all ready, I proceed with combining my cochineal pigment with the tempera. My pigment is still quite wet, almost like damp chalk in its consistency. If it were less crumbly, I wonder if I could pick up a chunk and use it like an oil pastel on a piece of paper. I add a few chunks of cochineal to my mulling surface, then two drops of egg yolk. The egg yolk lands on the pigment totally intact as a drop, and doesn’t immediately combine at all. Use my palette knife to try to incorporate. The result is a quite thick and creamy looking magenta substance – not a paste, quite, because it is very moist, but also very thick. Use the side of the candlestick muller without a hole to try to incorporate and find this challenging – I seem to be losing a lot of paint that sticks to the muller and starts to dry out. Maybe this is an egg yolk problem? I scrape off as much as I can and keep trying to mull, but I’m seeing no noticeable difference in how the paint feels under the muller – it wasn’t noticeably gritty to begin with and there hasn’t been much change. I mull for a few minutes (maybe 3?) and decide to paint out.

Cochineal and tempera.

Image URL:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/128418753@N06/51259303194/in/album-72157719443923882/

The paint is quite thick and goes on kind of gloppily. I have to spread it out quite a bit to get an even layer and end up with a lot of paint still on my brush. I paint a second layer going the other way, result is very vibrant and glossy but seems to take a long time to dry. I add a little more egg yolk and paint out again, but it’s still a little hard to work with on the brush, so I add several drops of water. This produces my most successful paint out – though I wonder if this is in part due to the fact that I’m painting on an extra sheet and have more room to work.

The larger, more successful third paint out of cochineal and tempera.

Image URL: https://www.flickr.com/photos/128418753@N06/51258559306/in/album-72157719443923882/

Next I move on to yellow ochre and tempera. Follow the same procedure as above – though the yellow ochre is so dry and finely powdered it’s much easier to work with than the cochineal. Once again the egg yolk does not immediately soak into the pigment – I wonder why? This time I add some water right away after my experience with the cochineal and begin mulling. This is, in general, a more pleasant mulling experience. I’ve used more pigment this time so I’m less worried about all the paint getting stuck to the muller. I do still have to scrape paint off every thirty seconds or so (in fact, the bottom of this candlestick is not flat and is also textured, which makes things more difficult). After a short time, one or two minutes, things seem well combined and I decide to try painting out (I am thinking I may not have the methodical nature necessary to be an artisan). The paint is thick and dries quickly on the page. I add more egg yolk and achieve a softer, more consistent stroke (each different balance of pigment, binding medium, and water is labeled on my card). The color of the ochre is beautiful, and it seems more like paint than the cochineal/tempera mix did (why do I think this? ). My final paint out has a few more drops of water. At first I’m not sure this makes much of a difference, but when I paint out a larger area on my second scrap sheet, the result is much more even in texture and color, and seems like the right balance.

Next I move on to azurite and tempera. Follow the same procedure as above, adding even more water before I begin mulling. Combining the egg yolk with the pigment before mulling produces a distinctly green tinge, I guess from the yellow and blue mixing. I wonder if this will come out in the paint. Mulling the azurite is the hardest of the three. It’s noticeably gritty, and because we didn’t receive much of it and had to use sparingly, I’m constantly scraping paint off the muller. As I mull, the paint has almost a grey watery tinge. After about five minutes I scrape everything off the muller and attempt to get it all together with the palette knife – it’s really spread out across my mulling surface and already seems to be drying so I add a tiny bit more water and paint out. This is more like a watercolor in texture but produces a beautiful deep blue on the page. I find I’m using most of the paint to cover even the small area on my sample card, unlike with the other pigments where I had paint left over to paint out over a larger area on my backup card. It’s not exactly pleasant to paint with – I feel like I’m having to work pretty hard to get it all off my brush and in an even layer. Definitely still some grittiness.

Azurite and tempera, showing the grayish green that was produced upon mixing the egg yolk with the blue pigment.

Image URL: https://www.flickr.com/photos/128418753@N06/51258757713/in/album-72157719443923882/

Azurite drying on the muller. This made mulling much more difficult.

Image URL: https://www.flickr.com/photos/128418753@N06/51258559396/in/album-72157719443923882/

For fun, I combine I tiny bit of remaining azurite paint with yellow ochre to try to make green – it does work, but instead of mixing them beforehand I just paint over some ochre on azurite (because I had so little azurite remaining) so they don’t combine all that well. The resulting green is very dark, perhaps a forest green.

Next I move on to working with glair, but decide to work across my sheet rather than down, so finishing each pigment in turn. Removing the foam from on top of the glair is interesting – it just pours right off. I wonder who first figured this out? I follow the same procedure as with the tempera, adding a few drops of the glair, one drop of water, and combining before beginning to mull. Mulling process very similar, though I was a little less sparing with the pigment this time, which helped. I mull for a few minutes and paint out. I think I may not have mulled for long enough this time – the paint is chalky and a little uneven. I add more water which does produce a more even coat on the page.

Ochre and glair - this was one of my favorite paints to work with.

Image URL: https://www.flickr.com/photos/128418753@N06/51257829632/in/album-72157719443923882/

**note: my initial cochineal/tempera paint out of two layers is still not completely dry – wet in the middle**

Now that my gum Arabic is combined, I rinse my palette knife and muller and move on, adding two drops of the binding medium and one drop of water to several chunks of cochineal (and I still have more left over). This combines quite well and mulls more easily than the others have, though there’s still no noticeable grittiness. I think I may be roughing up the plastic lid I’m using and getting plastic fibers in my paint. After a few minutes I paint out and get a pretty similar result to the glair mixture – gloppy, sticking to the brush, uneven on the page. I add more water and achieve a much more pleasant result that’s got more covering power than either the tempera or glair. More water seems to be the key – I need to add more than I think. But trial and error is also a helpful tool here.

Moving on to the ochre, same procedure as above. This paints out beautifully the first time – very smooth and full coverage on the paper. I add one more drop of water and it’s even better: thick but not gloppy, doesn’t stick to the brush, creates one even layer on the page. The yellow ochre is definitely the easiest to work with of the three pigments.

Gum Arabic and ochre – same procedure. Once again, my first paint out is lovely, very similar to the glair mixture in texture and coverage. I add one more drop of water which once again seems to improve things – I’m getting the same coverage on the page with less paint and less noticeable brush strokes, which seems like a positive. Why does adding more water do this? I guess the pigment must be quite opaque to begin with, and more water just makes it more spreadable, not more transparent.

Final pigment is azurite. The glair doesn’t produce a green effect but it does still look gray and watery while mulling. I mull for a little longer this time. The paint is a little smoother than the tempera/azurite mixture and goes on in a relatively even layer that dries quickly, but does seem a little thick still. I add more glair and recombine and end up with a much lighter, easier to spread paint that goes on very evenly but has noticeably less coverage. My paint is beginning to dry out so I add a little water and mull it a bit more for one last pass. This looks similar to the first mixture when I paint it out on the pigment card, but when I move to my backup card and paint with more room, it’s quite different – lighter, more even, slightly more green looking. I wonder how much my observations of these pigments are hemmed in by painting them out over such a small area, since this isn’t how they would have been used in the early modern period. It seems that in order to really get a feel for them, I’d have to paint a picture. And become a trained artist, I suppose.

Finally, gum Arabic and azurite. This mixes and mulls easier than the other two azurite mixtures. I add more water from the beginning which makes mulling easier too. The result is beautiful! A deeper blue and more even coverage than either of the other two azurite paints. I could imagine painting a dark stormy sky or ocean with this paint.

My sample card with smaller spaces for painting. As I went along, I felt that using paint over a larger area gave me a better feel for its properties, as you can see with the gum arabic column.

Image URL: https://www.flickr.com/photos/128418753@N06/51258757678/in/album-72157719443923882/