Back to basics: Experimenting with egg tempera

Return to the foundations of painting in this new practical series designed for artists, art historians, curators and anyone curious about how paintings are made.

‘Back to basics’ offers hands-on insight into the traditional materials and processes that have shaped painting for centuries, from preparing grounds and stretching canvas to grinding pigments, making egg tempera and mixing oil paint from scratch. Through demonstration and practice, you’ll develop a deeper appreciation of the physical properties that define a work of art, and how artists have manipulated these elements to achieve different effects. Each session focuses on a different process and can be taken individually or as part of the full series.

We are used to seeing egg tempera paintings in the Gallery but how were they actually made? How were colours created and what was the paint like to use? How long did these paintings take to complete, and how did artists begin?

In this one-day course, artist Robin-Lee Hall guides you through the fascinating process of making and using egg tempera. Through step-by-step demonstrations, hands-on experiments, and close looking at paintings in the collection, you’ll explore pigments, surfaces, colour mixing and mark-making to understand how artists of the past created works of such vibrancy and depth.

By making your own painting and experimenting with it, you’ll explore how this ancient medium behaves under the brush, including its fast-drying translucency, its capacity for precision, and the unique luminosity that has made egg tempera such a lasting technique. Alongside practical work in the studio, we’ll look closely at examples from the National Gallery Collection to see how artists have used egg tempera to remarkable effect.

This course is open to everyone, including professional and amateur artists, curators, art historians and anyone who’s curious about the medium and wants to ‘get their hands dirty’ and better understand the medium.

All materials are provided alongside handouts with extra resources. The session takes place onsite in our state-of-the-art Clore Art Studio in our Roden Centre for Creative Learning.

Robin-Lee Hall is an award-winning portrait painter and Past President of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. Her paintings have been hung at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and the Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery, as well as other galleries in and around London. She has won the Ondaatje Prize for Portraiture and Gold Medal at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters Annual Exhibition. As well as being a practicing artist, Robin delivers talks, tours, group drawing and painting sessions. She works for the National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery and the Royal Academy of Arts. She is currently writing a book on how to paint in egg tempera, a medium she specialises in.