How was paint made in the medieval times?

Answer 1

I am not sure what type of painter you mean. If you mean a house type painter there wasn't any. House painting is a modern job and there wasn't any paints made in the middle ages. Actually, all the way into the 1930's and 1940's to paint a house was very expensive and very few people had a house that was painted. If you mean an artist he would have been an artist for the church and painting religious subjects. The art of the time was all religious and egg tempera was used as paint on wood planks. Some still exists, but historical information in art mainly comes from books made by the monks and on tapestry.

Answer 2

1st AnswerThere was no paint really. Houses and buildings didn't get painted, but white washed. An artist would use a tempra and egg mixture for his work. The colors were from natural sources and ground up to make a powder and then was added to egg yolk to make the paint. 2nd AnswerMost medieval paintings were tempera, which is described in the first answer. (see link below)

Water colors were known in ancient times, and were used throughout the middle ages. They are basically pigments ground very finely and mixed with water, to which a binding agent such as gum Arabic has been added. (see link below)

Gouache was also used, and is very similar to water color except that the pigments are coarser and something such as chalk or ground egg shells has been added to provide body. (see link below)

Another type of paint that was used in ancient times, and continued to be used in medieval painting, was casein. This is a water based paint rather like oil paint, which is made by preparing casein glue and mixing it with ground pigments. The casein glue is made by processing curdled milk with ammonia or ammonium carbonate, keeping it hot and skimming foam until no foam remains. My guess is that medieval artists got their ammonium carbonate from local alchemists. (see link below)

Oil paints seem to have been invented in the Early Middle Ages, and the oldest known oil paintings date from about 650 AD. But oil paints were difficult to perfect, and the earliest great oil paintings are products of the Late Middle Ages. Some older histories say oil paints were invented around 1410 AD by Jan van Eyck. During the time in between, oils became more and more widely used, first for protective covering, then for detailing tempera paintings, and finally for painting entirely of oils.

The difficulty with oil paints is that the oil decomposes with time, cracking and darkening. The paints are made by mixing oils with pigments, but the trick is to use the right oils, prepared the right way, with the right additives, to prevent the paintings from decomposing. A large number of oils are available, and some are better than others. Additives that make oil paint with really good consistency sometimes cause the paint to darken. Also, combinations of some pigments, whether in mixture or by painting a layer of one over a layer of the other, weaken the paint, causing it to crack and flake.

But in brief, the technique of making oil paint is basically to mix ground pigment with a carefully selected and treated oil, and other ingredients such as beeswax. (see link below)

Answer 3

Medieval painters had access to several types of paint, depending mainly on what surface the paint was to be applied to. On parchment (for illustrating book manuscripts) the most common type was egg tempera which used ground-up colour pigments mixed with egg-whites (or sometimes egg yolks) and water.

For painting wood, such as on altar-screens and for decorating wooden ceilings in buildings, the same pigments were mixed with oil - this might be linseed oil (from the the same flax plant that produced linen), poppy oil or oil from almonds or walnuts.

Wall paintings on lime-mortared surfaces were of pigments mixed with lime and water, effectively becoming part of the wall itself; certain colours were also mixed with egg as a binder. Churches, cathedrals and monastic buildings had their interior walls covered in mural paintings, most of which have been deliberately destroyed.

Paintings on stone wall surfaces were executed (from the mid-thirteenth century onwards) with oil paint.

From the hairs that remain trapped in the layers of paint we know that brushes were made from the tail hair of red squirrels (now sadly endangered as a species).

Answer 4

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