You might need to get a porphyry/muller and grind that pigment down to a finer powder…..
There are glass mullers around, more available than stone, but I think it just takes some searching. I ought to have one for my medieval painting kit/display setup, but I didn't want to haul around more weight at the time (this coming from a guy who hauls 40lbs of Roman arms & armor around, so, a pathetic excuse, but at least I'm not a mosaic artist)
I do have a stone mortar and pestle. Found one in a Bed Bath & Beyond for $20. But yeah extracting said powder can be annoying, which is why I'm sure painters used flat stones to grind on. Cennini says "the more you grind the better the pigment"; I used that line once at a medieval artist display I set up in a museum, said to a little girl who was just kind of poking with the mortar…She got this "Challenge Accepted" look on her face and stood there for a solid 20 minutes grinding away (I bring eggshell for demonstration and a little safer than say cobalt), he parents had to nearly drag her away kicking and screaming because they had a set time to be in the exhibition I was supporting. Although be prepared to be grinding for up to an hour (again, what apprentices are for, but we have child labor laws nowadays).
Cennini also mentions that when you're done grinding and the pigment isn't to be used immediately, one can 'scrape it up' with a knife (I'm thinking a pallet knife or paint scraper today could work OK) and put it into a paper leaf you can fold up. The pigment will dry so then it's just a matter of tempering with water and binder when needed. Shells were used as individual color containers before the days of the ceramic versions, and I've seen illustrations of both illuminators and scribes using horns for containers, although mostly for inks.
I just remembered another period book/author you can look for: Leon Battista Alberti
Glad you are having fun playing with these. Lapis is such a wonderful color, no wonder it was considered precious stone. (My personal fav is cobalt blue, but lapis is definitely up there)
Also, apparently many icons and other paintings of Mary where her cloak was painted in L.L. would oxidize over the centuries to a black, which apparently lead to the assumption that she was wearing black as a color of mourning. Although I never dug deep enough to figure out of that was another Victorian period screwup or not. I mentioned the skin tones earlier, some of the mixtures had pigments that would react and oxidize into a green color, so there was also this assumption that well, clearly, they are depicting people suffering in the Plague…. *sigh* Also considering many icons were varnished, which would oxidize or just age darker, and surrounded by candle smoke would get dark and greasy. Oh, clearly they were painting this to be "sad" and "dark and gloomy"…Yeaaaaah right. They took all of that effort to gild and stamp the entire background in GOLD and then surround the icon in a deeply ornately carved gothic-arched frame, also gilded to the teeth in gold, just to let it get sooty and grimy. BS. These things would practically blind you in the light.
One thing I did really enjoy with that ancient painting class in college was gilding. That was particularly challenging because you needed a space/room with no air movement, but the whole process is fascinating and of course it's gold and silver so the brilliance when you get to burnishing has a sense of results. Then I find out years later a number of those Fayum portraits also have backgrounds and things like wreaths gilded in gold. Gee wilikiers so no wonder that found its way into Coptic, Byzantine and early Christian art...
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Date: 2017-03-14 12:52 pm (UTC)There are glass mullers around, more available than stone, but I think it just takes some searching. I ought to have one for my medieval painting
kit/display setup, but I didn't want to haul around more weight at the time (this coming from a guy who hauls 40lbs of Roman arms & armor around, so, a pathetic excuse, but at least I'm not a mosaic artist)
I do have a stone mortar and pestle. Found one in a Bed Bath & Beyond for $20. But yeah extracting said powder can be annoying, which is why I'm sure painters used flat stones to grind on. Cennini says "the more you grind the better the pigment"; I used that line once at a medieval artist display I set up in a museum, said to a little girl who was just kind of poking with the mortar…She got this "Challenge Accepted" look on her face and stood there for a solid 20 minutes grinding away (I bring eggshell for demonstration and a little safer than say cobalt), he parents had to nearly drag her away kicking and screaming because they had a set time to be in the exhibition I was supporting. Although be prepared to be grinding for up to an hour (again, what apprentices are for, but we have child labor laws nowadays).
Cennini also mentions that when you're done grinding and the pigment isn't to be used immediately, one can 'scrape it up' with a knife (I'm thinking a pallet knife or paint scraper today could work OK) and put it into a paper leaf you can fold up. The pigment will dry so then it's just a matter of tempering with water and binder when needed. Shells were used as individual color containers before the days of the ceramic versions, and I've seen illustrations of both illuminators and scribes using horns for containers, although mostly for inks.
I just remembered another period book/author you can look for: Leon Battista Alberti
Glad you are having fun playing with these. Lapis is such a wonderful color, no wonder it was considered precious stone. (My personal fav is cobalt blue, but lapis is definitely up there)
Also, apparently many icons and other paintings of Mary where her cloak was painted in L.L. would oxidize over the centuries to a black, which apparently lead to the assumption that she was wearing black as a color of mourning. Although I never dug deep enough to figure out of that was another Victorian period screwup or not. I mentioned the skin tones earlier, some of the mixtures had pigments that would react and oxidize into a green color, so there was also this assumption that well, clearly, they are depicting people suffering in the Plague…. *sigh* Also considering many icons were varnished, which would oxidize or just age darker, and surrounded by candle smoke would get dark and greasy. Oh, clearly they were painting this to be "sad" and "dark and gloomy"…Yeaaaaah right. They took all of that effort to gild and stamp the entire background in GOLD and then surround the icon in a deeply ornately carved gothic-arched frame, also gilded to the teeth in gold, just to let it get sooty and grimy. BS. These things would practically blind you in the light.
One thing I did really enjoy with that ancient painting class in college was gilding. That was particularly challenging because you needed a space/room with no air movement, but the whole process is fascinating and of course it's gold and silver so the brilliance when you get to burnishing has a sense of results. Then I find out years later a number of those Fayum portraits also have backgrounds and things like wreaths gilded in gold. Gee wilikiers so no wonder that found its way into Coptic, Byzantine and early Christian art...