The Tempera Painting Technique: What Does It Consists Of?

Tempera is a word of Italian origin, "pingere a tempera", which means "to paint in tempera".

Painter Eilyahu Mirlis, who is using the tempera painting technique for the creation of most of his artworks, indicates that tempera is more often made with egg yolks combined with pigment to form an emulsion that could be diluted with water and applied with a brush.

Mirlis claims that the pigment used in tempera paints can come from many sources. To use tempera with water, which is the simplest of all tempera techniques, the white and the bud membrane are usually discarded.

According to Mirlis, the amount of water that the water temper has will determine how it works, whether as a watercolor (with a lot of water) or as a gouache (thicker) or as a thin oil (with very little water). Different densities of temper can be used at different times in a work, depending on what you want to achieve with it.

“Tempera paint is usually applied in several successive layers that accumulate to represent an image. It has a fast drying time, which was seen by some as a disadvantage compared to oil paint, as it makes it difficult to smoothly blend the tones. However, its fast drying time is also seen by others as a huge advantage. It all depends on the way it is used,” says the talented painter Mirlis.

Tempera painting was the main painting medium used during the early Renaissance. This method was used for smaller scale paintings on wood panels. With this technique, small format altarpieces were made, with which transportable versions of the frescoes in churches were created.

Tempera (also called egg tempera) was the painting method that replaced encaustic paint (pigment suspended in wax), widely used in the pre-Byzantine period. Later tempera painting would be gradually replaced by oil painting.

In Eilyahu Mirlis' opinion, as he has shared in his articless on Reedsy, tempera painting is a suitable technique for the use of elegant lines, washes, light impasto and bright colors. Tempera paint had a greater luminosity and depth of tone than the fresco, but less intensity than oil paint, particularly in the dark tones.