One of my favourite painters is Andrew Wyeth but instead of focusing on his body of work I wanted to talk about his paint of choice egg tempera which I have recently been experimenting with. Egg tempera is a very old form of paint that went out of fashion when oil paints were invented, they have a muted earthy colour to them unlike the artificial sheen of certain acrylics and they dry extremely fast unlike oils. I thought this would work well with my painting style and I was somewhat correct, the quick drying paints made it easy to create multiple thin layers however unlike acrylics even the dry paint is very vulnerable to water and I found myself destroying previous layers with over coats that were thinned with water so I had to adapt my painting style accordingly.
Tempera paints also clash with acrylics when used together since even non glossy acrylics have a shiny plastic effect when compared to egg tempera. This means I cant use acrylic undercoating's or backgrounds which is a problem since Tempera is very expensive and I don't want to use lots of it. my solution to this problem was using an oil base coat and background since they have a similar consistency, I then paint on to the oil when it is relatively dry.
I have had to adapt my painting style to accommodate the difficulties of egg tempera but the finished results and the subtle differences from the two other commonly used paints make it a very compelling medium to continue to master.