Formulas and Recipes

Master the use of Rabbit Skin Glue for canvas, wood panels, and distemper paint. Achieve professional, archival painting results with this traditional material.

Learn how to make your own gouache paint at home with this easy step-by-step guide. Mix pigments, gum arabic, and water to create your own opaque watercolors. Perfect for artists looking to experiment with new colors and consistency.

Emulsion grounds typically consist of an emulsifying adhesive, such as animal collagen glue and vegetable oil with chalk and lead white. There are many formulas for emulsion grounds, also called "half-chalk grounds," but the one herein we've tried and found that it works quite well if you follow the instructions carefully. This formula and its preparation is based on the Full Oil Ground described in Egg Tempera Painting, Tempera Underpainting, Oil Emulsion Painting.

Learn how to prepare and apply gesso for wood panels with detailed instructions on priming, applying fabric cover, and polishing for a perfect finish. Discover the best techniques here.

Learning from artists' manuscripts, a contemporary artist adapts a 15th-century recipe for preparing grounds for oil painting on wood panels. In her book, The Art of Arts, Anita Albus discusses materials and practices of oil and tempera painting that have either been lost or fallen into disuse. Albus makes a poignant observation that ever since the industrial revolution, it has been an industry that dictates what materials are available to artists. Gesso production falls into this category alongside the preparation of paints and mediums. Artists have succumbed to the materials handed to us. She reminds us that before industrialization and typical of the European artist's guilds of the 15th and 16th centuries, it was largely the artists who prepared their own formulas and concoctions in painting.

Casein paint or milk paint is unlike any other natural water-based paint as it dries waterproof. Herein is a complete description of preparing casein or milk paint for art and home decorative applications.

Unsized paper is called “waterleaf” paper. It is usually composed of hydrophilic cellulose fibers, meaning they ‘love water.’ This is a good quality while the paper is being made, but it can lead to unfortunate consequences once the paper is made. The extreme porosity of an untreated sheet of paper means that printing or drawing inks and water-based paints will soak into the paper spreading quickly and randomly. This is called ‘bleedthrough.’ Sizing retards some of the paper’s absorbency.

Dammar (or damar) or soft copal varnishes are soft, very flexible, and transparent but dry slowly. These varnishes have a bright appearance and a faint pale yellow color. The color may be varied from golden yellow to yellowish brown by gamboge, dragon's blood, and asphaltum.

Part two on preparing a wood panel for painting with the application of chalk grounds and the sixth in our technical series on painting icons, this article discusses preparing the glue solution used in the preparation of wood panels for tempera painting—size, pavoloka, and gesso—since the earliest Christian period until today. While the series specifically apply to making icon boards and preparing them for painting egg tempera icons, it has application to preparing wood panels for painting in any medium on chalk grounds.

Not all tempera painters strictly use egg yolk as the binder for their paint. Some of the most popular recipes are egg, casein, and gum tempera, shared by Russian and Ukrainian painters. What follows are formulas and instructions on making and using tempera and emulsion paints.

Recipes that we have tried and used. Grind the gallnuts to a fine powder and immerse them in half the water. In a few weeks, mold will cover the top surface. Skim off the mold and pour the liquid through a filter. Dissolve gum Arabic in a small amount of water and add it to the liquid. Dissolve the ferrous sulfate in water and add it to the liquid.

Tempera grassa, which Pietro Annigoni learned from the Russian artist Nikolai Lokoff, is a variation of tempera painting that some believe to have been used by artists in the 16th century, although there is little evidence so far to support this claim.