Middle Ages - Egg Painting

As part of our middle ages study we were reading Marguerite Makes A Book which is a lovely, Illustrated story about about a young girl helping her father make a 'book of hours'.

In the story she tells how she prepares the paints - so we decided to have a go.

We started by whisking some egg white, leaving it to the side to settle and pouring off the separated liquid.

We crushed parsley, wrapped it in linen and soaked it in egg to make green.

Soaked Madder root in warm water then added the water to the egg to make a pinky, red.

Soaked Saffron (wrapped in linen) directly in the egg for yellow.

Crushed Lapiz Lazuil and rolled it in wax to attempt blue paint - although this failed to make a blue paint, it was still an interesting experience (I discovered after that this is the hardest paint to make)

I couldn't get hold of any vermillion so we just used a vermillion powder paint added to the egg instead.

After we were finished, it was time to start painting. The first step was to apply gold leaf and once that was dry and polished it was time to add the paint to some pictures I downloaded from a 15th century book of hours.

The egg white paint worked well but seemed to lack a depth and appeared more like watercolour paint. After some research online we discovered that the great painters used egg yolk paints and applied them in many coats to achieve a real depth of colour - we made some additional yolk paints and they did work a lot better.