Egg Tempera
Painting

The oldest
painting medium

Before oil paint, before acrylic — before almost every medium used today — there was egg tempera. Used by Botticelli, van Eyck (in combination with oil), Duccio, and the whole tradition of Italian panel painting, it produces a quality of light that no other medium can replicate.

The surface dries quickly to a matte, luminous finish. Colours retain their saturation without the yellowing that affects oils. Painted on gesso over rigid panel, a well-made egg tempera will still look vivid five centuries from now.

It demands precision, patience, and a fundamentally different way of thinking about mark-making. You cannot blend egg tempera the way you blend oil paint. You build form through hatching and cross-hatching — layering thin, translucent marks until the surface reads as continuous tone.

Materials:
what you actually need

The intimidating part of egg tempera is usually the materials. In practice, the essential kit is remarkably simple.

• The binder Egg yolk, separated from the white and membrane. One yolk, thinned 50/50 with distilled water, is your medium. Mixed fresh daily.
• Dry pigments Ground mineral and earth pigments — the same ones used in the Renaissance. You mulch them with the egg emulsion before painting. A small set covers most needs.
• The ground Traditional chalk gesso on a rigid panel — wood or Masonite. The surface must be completely non-absorbent and extremely smooth. Gesso preparation is itself a craft.
• Brushes Kolinsky sable rounds, sizes 0–4. You work small. The technique rewards small brushes and careful marks.
• Water Distilled. For diluting the emulsion and cleaning brushes. Tap water can affect the chemistry of the medium over time.

Egg tempera vs. oil:
what changes

Many painters who study egg tempera find it changes how they approach oil painting as well — the discipline of working in layers, the attention to hatching direction, the understanding of translucent mark-making. The techniques are complementary.

"To work in tempera is to think about painting at the scale of marks rather than masses."

What MasterDemos
covers

The egg tempera demonstrations at MasterDemos walk through the entire process — from preparing the gesso ground to grinding pigments, mixing the emulsion, and building a painting through layered hatching from underpainting to final glazes.

You'll learn how the early masters structured their panels, how to think about value and colour temperature when working with a medium that dries lighter, and how to develop the specific mark-making discipline that egg tempera requires.

No prior experience with the medium is required — but a working knowledge of drawing and basic colour theory will help you get further faster.