Methods OF ICON PAINTIN
A contemporary iconographer speaking:
“To generate a very good icon, the icon-painter should adhere to ancient tactics. In old occasions, the standard background for icons was gold leaf or silver leaf. Gold being costly, icon-painters generally used easy paints that had been inexpensive and made of all-natural ingredients. Inside the poor village churches of Russian North, all the backgrounds had been accomplished with paints of pretty light color. ‘Fon,’ the Russian for background, just isn’t a Russian word. Our icon-painters named it ‘the light’. Priming for the panel was created of sturgeon glue, also a really costly material. Properly, in old instances icons have been not cheap… “ (Father Zinon) Get more information about иконописная мастерская
Icons are religious pictures painted on wooden panels, typically made of linden or pine wood. Their production is actually a extended and complex process. A layer of linen cloth soaked in sturgeon glue is place around the panel. The ground is made of chalk mixed with fish glue. This is gesso. Up to ten layers of your gesso are applied more than the cloth, or pavoloka . An outline of your composition is incised around the gesso with the point of a needle, usually based on an icon-painting manual.
To prepare tempera paints, mineral pigments are mixed with water and egg yolk. The common minerals are cinnabar for reds, ochre (iron oxide) for yellows and lapis-lazuli for blues. Natural minerals give transparency to colors. Transparency is key in developing the effect of luminosity in icons. Light and dark tones of distinctive thickness are brought one on top from the other, layer soon after layer. The white ground reflects light falling on its surface back via the semi-transparent tempera. The impact is that of inner light radiating from the image.
Soon after painting is accomplished an icon is varnished with boiled linseed oil, olifa. Russian artists added amber to their olifa. The linseed-amber varnish protects icons from scratches and gives them a deeper tone. But, following many years in a wood-heated church or inside a candle-lit ‘red’ corner of a peasant hut, the varnish becomes really dark and obscures the image. Within the early twentieth century, to clean the old varnish off the icon surface, restorers used fire to soften the olifa. They place a little bit alcohol on the surface of an icon and set it on fire. A restorer then was able to scrape off the olifa varnish and clean the icon.
