How to get better ink: Step Two

Egg tempera dries really quickly. I’m not a methodical painter. I would get frustrated with having to cross-hatch a transition from one color to another. I like to blend paint while it’s wet. Sometime in the 1400s artists must’ve started adding oil to the egg tempera recipe to prolong its drying time (this egg-and-oil paint is called tempera grasso). They tried oils from nuts and seeds. If you go to the grocery store you can find similar oils for cooking—vegetable oil, grape seed oil, olive oil. Raphael even tried walnut oil for his paint. The one that seemed to work best was linseed oil. Oil and water don’t mix, so turpentine is the solvent. You use turpentine to thin the paint and clean your brushes.

Eventually artists ditched the egg and just used oil.

Watch this video to see how you get oil out of linseed, then use it to make paint:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UxsAij-ykg
Turpentine is made out of pine sap. It’s distilled. A still is a sealed, contained cooking pot with a pipe coming out of the lid. You heat the sap and the fumes go up the pipe. The fumes condense as they cool and drip out the other end of the pipe. I couldn’t find you a video that shows in a straight-forward way how to distill turpentine. I found lots of videos of guys not quite making turpentine. Watch these if you dare:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_fRnEpQ55E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvduGMTadwk
Everything you want to know about pigment is in this book:
https://www.amazon.com/Color-Natural-History-Victoria-Finlay-ebook/dp/B000XUBDIA/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=color&qid=1624668736&s=books&sr=1-4
More egg tempera: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geafR2FlHO4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTYhS91rIUE
Here’s an artist painting with tempera grasso: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMXb8jNaaeU

Back to the beginning of The Western Civ User’s Guide to Reading & Writing.

Don’t forget: I wrote another Western Civ User’s Guide! Back to the beginning of The Western Civ User’s Guide to Time & Space

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