A Piece of Me #41, egg tempera on panel.

I have been doing underdrawings for the other panels (of this big 64 panel project that you can read about here) earlier this week, thus yesterday I was able to return to the egg tempera series. Here on the left then, is the second in that group. Strangely enough, I’ve been somewhat apprehensive about this one. For the source image is a plastered wall covered with a light warm yellow wash of paint. Otherwise, not much there. Boring. So the challenge was how to reproduce that well enough so as to integrate the panel into the final assembled painting but also create something that could stand alone as an image for the roving eye to enjoy.

painting tools: toothbrush, calligrapher’s brush, cosmetic sponges

In this case, I was able to press a few “new” tools into service as you will see on the left: an extremely fine mesh cosmetic sponge  for the very light tonal washes (bottom, right), a calligrapher’s brush for the local washes and a tooth brush for the gray speckles. I’m pretty pleased with the result.

A technical write up of the lessons learned about egg tempera in this series of panels here.