Do Art Wrong: SPQR Blue

[spqrblues]

(pic #1: Lapis Lazuli swatches on the right, modern Ultramarine swatch on the left.)

I've been playing with Lapis Lazuli blue in my ancient palette since I acquired a small amount of powdered pigment, supposedly from the same source the Romans (and later painters) used. It's not the super-expensive super-high quality called Fra Angelico Blue, but even a medium-nice grade can be 40 times the cost of, say, red ochre (which, to be fair, is basically dirt).


(pic #2: unsuccessful Egyptian Blue paint (over black ink). It's basically just sand barely adhered to the page.)

Maybe because of this, I was very careful when mixing my ten bucks worth of pigment into paint, and my first attempt turned out very well. Much more highly pigmented than, say, the Daniel Smith brand Lapis Lazuli Genuine watercolour. The picture (pic #1) doesn't fully do it justice. There's something about it that sets it apart from the modern synthetic version of Ultramarine (Lapis Lazuli was also originally called Ultramarine, "from across the sea," since the stones for it were imported). My Lapis Lazuli paint was much more successful than my attempts at getting Egyptian Frit Blue (considered the first synthetic pigment) to work in watercolour.


(pic #3: The darkest blue here is one layer of the concentrated version of the paint.)

Over the weekend I took a few hours break from work to experiment with the Lapis Lazuli paint left in the mixing cup when I made the first small batch of paint. Waste not, want not--my initial intention was just to get the paint out of the cup to use. It's not quite the Fra Angelico extraction method, and I'm starting with a lower grade of pigment, but I was able to precipitate out different grades of pigment particles and get a more concentrated version in the paint binder.

I'm a novice at making paint, whether watercolour, tempera, or encaustic. Who knows whether I'm filtering out the impurities or just making a mess. But I like the result.

Comments

[corvideye.livejournal.com]

Actually, the method I learned is to start with the mortar and pestle, then do the wet slab grinding. The latter is really the key to getting a reasonably brushable, not chunky, paint. I couldn't afford a real glass muller, but I found an old glass stopper with a flat head at a flea market and had a friend sandblast it... works pretty well; the sandblast texture is all the grit you need. Failing that, though, the base/bottom of a stone mortar actually works pretty well on the slab!

The interesting thing about grinding is that each pigment has its ideal grind. If I recall right, lapis actually goes deader at too fine a particle size; you need a certain amount of (small) chunks to get the light refraction you want. The very knowledgable guy from the Rublev paint company (all historic pigments, fantastic stuff) has an extensive thesis that part of the 'secrets' of old master painting are simply that they/their assistants were hand-grinding each pigment, creating multiple-sized particles instead of the uniform ones we have now, and even using different grinds of the same pigment in different areas of the painting.

Eggshell... good idea, I'll have to try that one. Kids LOVE grinding in mortars. I've done demos both with pigments and with spices. If you want to keep a hyperactive six year old sitting down, give him a mortar full of whole spices and tell him to pulverize them. Works like a charm, plus you get spices! Also old handcrank coffee grinders.

I think you must be mistaken about the blue oxidizing... lapis is an inert mineral, and I've never heard of it turning. (The victorians, on the other hand, had all kinds of nasty media that turned black and cracked.) Silver would blacken, and greens often turn brown.

I love gilding. It feels like alchemy, and it's just so very pretty!

I recommend the Cennini translation by Daniel V. Thompson, who actually tried all the methods and thus does a painter's-view translation. He also did a fantastic book (available cheaply from Dover) called methods and materials of tempera painting, in which he takes the Cennini methods and gives you detailed instructions and measurements. Taught me a lot of what I knew about egg tempera, enough to get started with it in absence of live instruction. Tons of details about gesso etc.

What I find to be the key with tempera is to do an ink wash underpainting. I don't know if the Romans did, but the medievals did, and it makes a huge difference between it looking cartoonishly flat and bright versus deep and subtle. I had a piece on a deadline crunch where I ran out of time to do the underpaintings, and the differences are still painfully obvious (at least to me). Egg tempera is NOT a fast medium. And each pigment behaves differently; some you can glaze with, some you can only hatch. It is unlike any other medium I've tried. Check out Koo Schadler for amazing contemporary egg tempera in Renn. technique.

One way to get a sort of easy egg tempera preview is to mix egg (either glair or yolk, depending on the color) into premade watercolor. Gives it a nice satin shine.

[meritahut.livejournal.com]

Partial reply, because I'm up to my eyebrows in work and snow-shovelling right now, and I would spend all afternoon talking about this :)

Adding gold leaf to paintings was all the rage when my friends and I were creating fan art. We were peculiar. I remember people laughing when they got to "gold leaf" in the medium description. Being a sensitive teen, I of course figured they were sneering at it. Probably they were just surprised. I have some gold leaf in my art supplies that I put away in a safe place for later use in a Fayum-style portrait. Of course, "in a safe place" means "don't remember where I put it."

I'd heard that some pigments change hue the finer they're ground. I'd noticed that the Rublev's Malachite (0-30µ) is a different hue than Kremer's less-fine 50µ Malachite--intentional difference, I assume?

My Egyptian Blue needs some help in the mulling and binding department. Glass mullers are so costly. I'd been looking for an alternative, but was worried that a stone mortar and pestle would be too porous.

OK, I have more to say, but I'd better get back to the grind (har har).

[palusbuteo.livejournal.com]

That's cool about the glass muller alternative, nice find!

As for the Victorian assumptions, that thing about Lapis (or whatever blue was used that oxidized black, I could certainly be mis-remembering), the passage was what I had been told/read about back on college, many years ago, but for some reason that stuck with me....Considering how much "more" we know now as opposed to those "experts" only 100-200 years ago who made their sometimes outlandish "theories" stand out as indisputable fact, etc etc. If those earlier art historians only had X-Ray and Gamma-Ray tech to look deeper into the layers, they'd realize how off the mark they were. In a roundabout way, all of that "traditionalist" vs "modernism" attitude I find "hilarious" sometimes when I consider how much the Impressionists got shit-on by the art community for *daring* to use these new-fangled synthetic and metalic paints, that come in a metal TUBE no less! The Horror! Blasphemy! Sort of like that incident with Faust when he showed Gutenberg's books off and it was deemed "Witchcraft" because no way anyone could produce a book so quickly, and the dastardly trickery to make a book look like it was hand-scribed to fool people...*insert Monty Python Holy Grail "She's a witch" scene*

I think you might be right about the differences in how fine a powder - effect of the final product.....I seem to remember seeing something about that in one of the facsimile manuals I have.

[meritahut.livejournal.com]

By the bye...Somewhere else, I read a comment from someone that they use an old glass stopper with a flat head that they found in a flea market...I don't remember where.... Was is here? Was it you? :)

I went on a search for glass stoppers and doorknobs, but haven't find anything adequate yet.