Almanack: A recipe for distemper
I fully intended this week to actually make some distemper paint and do a quick sketch with it to demonstrate its characteristics. Other activities got in the way, so you'll have to make do with a picture of a painting done with distemper by Edouard Vuillard.
I've never worked with distemper, so much of the information in this article is pulled from An Artist's Notebook, by Bernard Chaet, a handy reference published in 1978. Other bits of information have been culled from various online sources. I don't think this is a medium much used these days so there's little information out there, save for discussions of distemper paintings made in other centuries. "Distemper" refers to paint that uses sizing (glue) as the medium. Standard oil paint uses oil, such as sunflower, linseed or lavendar oil as the medium, which takes considerable time to dry, so replacing it with sizing has the benefit of creating paint that dries speedily but retains the brilliance of oil paint. Last week's caveat applies here too: don't let the sizing spoil; it's disgusting.
The recipe:
Place one part rabbitskin glue and twelve parts water in a pan and soak for an hour. Heat the contents in a double boiler, taking care not to boil it, until all the glue granules are dissolved. Chaet specifies that the medium needs to be made fresh every day that you paint with it.
To create the actual colored paint, Chaet writes that "dry pigments, preground with water and stored in covered jars, can be spooned out in small amounts and mixed on the palette with the glue medium." Pigments can be picked up at any decent art store - Dick Blick, Utrecht and Pearl all carry them in nice little glass jars. There are no hard, fast recipes for the proportion of color to glue. If you've painted before, you know that some colors can be especially potent and dominate any other color already applied to the substrate, while other colors require layers of reapplication. Distemper probably takes a bit of experimentation and test pages to see how much pigment needs to be added to the medium.
The medium doesn't have to be kept on a heat source all through working, but the more gelatinous the glue becomes, the more distinct brushstrokes will become. If it cools too much, it becomes fairly unworkable, but the exact temperature and viscosity needed is something the individual artist gets to decide as he/she works.
I work almost exclusively on paper, so my inclination would be to size a sheet of watercolor paper with rabbitskin glue, let it dry overnight and have at it with distemper. Chaet indicates that unprepared linen sized with glue is a possibility, or a gessoed panel, so long as the gesso is prepared using the same glue as the distemper (a topic for another week). In painting, the principles of a cohesive bond are usually the ones you need to follow: it's ok to apply paint to a surface primed with the same ingredients used in the paint, but no good trying to mix unlike substances (literally, like oil and water).
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