[Stucco Annotation - Painting Stucco]

Name: Nina E-G
Date and Time:

2017.[December].[11], [12]:[00][pm]

Location: lab
Subject: Painting stucco
This annotation is meant to be an expansion on Stucco Annotation - Skillbuilding specifically focusing on painting the stucco. The A-P specifically mentions painting the stucco, so a better understanding of what he meant by "apply them with strong glue or paste glue." Did he mean coating them before painting, as a sort of 'priming' layer? Is this step necessary? This investigation was not undertaken in the same way as the stucco recreation, both due to time constraints and because of the focus of the annotation was on the materiality of the stucco rather than its use. As a result I used the stucco we had prepared earlier in the semester as a group; rye flour stucco and chalk stucco. We had made small shapes with each type and glued them onto canvas and board. Some were coated with rabbit skin glue, some with gesso, some with both, and some were left uncoated. The purpose of this was to understand the effects that such coating had on the visual aesthetics of the stucco (i.e. if this improved its appearance and/or made it take the paint better), and the stucco's durability.

I used a variety of paints, drawing on the knowledge from previous skillbuilding exercises which taught us how to make paint from powdered pigments. First, I experimented with madder lake and egg white. Hopefully the labels on the accompanying images are legible so readers can see what each stucco figure was painted with, but I will summarize my results in text below:

Madder and egg white: Produced a matte, off-pink sort of color. Mostly unaffected by whether the stucco had been coated with anything. I observed that for the uncoated stucco, the paint was "absorbed" into the stucco like it was water. This probably says something about the un-coated stucco's interaction with water.

I was not satisfied by the saturation of colors using egg white, so I turned to linseed oil, hoping it would result in brighter or more vivid colors.

Madder and linseed oil: I only did one of these. It looked, frankly, really bad. The color had low saturation and was very transparent. As I painted on an un-coated chalk stucco, the result was rather "veiny." (Perhaps madder and linseed would look better on coated stucco? Or perhaps this is just a warning against using madder lake as the sole pigment when making paint, I recall that it was often used as a 'glaze' on other colors...)

Verdigris and linseed oil: Apparently, verdigris was not often used with egg white, so I went straight to the oil. If not ground up enough, the verdigris did show some slight lumps. However, generally, it looked fine. It was very shiny, even after drying, and had good color saturation. At the time it also seemed like the verdigris was slower to turn green, so it stayed blue for longer.

On the advice of a fellow student working on oil painting on taffetta, I turned to 'earth' pigments, such as ochres. Those, apparently, produced paints with higher color saturation which dried well when mixed with oil.

Burgundy red ochre and linseed: This had high color saturation and produced an earthy red. Un-coated stucco began to show slight cracking, especially in the uncoated chalk; the uncoated rye flour took this paint well and looked good. Coated stucco took well to this paint and looked shiny and vibrant.

Burgundy red ochre and egg white: I did this just as an experiment on one half of a piece of stucco, to compare it with linseed oil. The stucco absorbed the paint well, it did not show signs of cracking paint. The egg white on rye flour resulted in a matte finish.

Lamp-black and linseed oil: I did not paint this one (by this point this exercise had become a group affair). The lamp black was a dark black color with high saturation and opacity. It stayed shiny even after drying.

Bavarian green earth and linseed oil: this was painted onto a flour stucco coated with rabbit skin glue. It was rather transparent and very shiny dark/olive green, causing the stucco to look like it had come out of a swamp.


Image 1:
Two verdigris+oil rye flour stuccos (the central shell shows some slight verdigris pigment lumping), one burgundy red ochre +linseed/egg white (half half) uncoated rye flour stucco.

Image 2: Unpainted angel, madder and linseed uncoated chalk stucco (the veiny one), madder and egg white uncoated rye stucco (the matte pinkish one), bavarian green earth and linseed oil (slimy), lamp black and linseed oil.

Image 3: chalk based burgundy red ochre and linseed painted stuccos, some unpainted stuccos.

Image 4: burgundy red ochre and linseed on rs glue and gesso coated rye flour stucco


Image 5: Madder and egg white on a flour stucco coated with rs glue and gesso


Image 6: two verdigris and linseed oil, uncoated stucco, left is rye flour base, right is chalk base.



Overall, this helps illustrate that coating the stucco in glue or in gesso does make a difference to how it looks painted, and probably also makes a difference on how long the stucco stays painted and/or remains intact. Earth pigments did seem to produce better results (versus madder or verdigris). Also, oil based paints resulted in more saturated colors on the stucco and often gave it a glossy finish. Further studies could investigate what kinds of paints the author-practitioner would have used on his stucco (perhaps inexpensive ones, given his interest in producing "ornaments at little expense"?) and how the stucco reacts to being "painted with gold" which he mentions specifically in fol. 29r_1. Also, when coated (or even when uncoated, in some cases), painted rye flour stucco looked good! Which indicates that it could have been used to make decorations in a hurry, if reliably "better" materials were unavailable.

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