BoredomBusted — Find Your Next Favorite Thing To Do
Discover hobbies, activities, places, and ideas that spark joy. Whether you're looking for something creative, active, social, or relaxing, BoredomBusted helps you find your next favorite thing to do.
Browse our hobby guides, things-to-do collections, and place ideas to never be bored again.
Dive into the vibrant world of tempera painting with this beginner's guide! Discover its rich history, unique techniques, and how to create stunning artwork using egg yolk as a binder. Perfect for aspiring artists, tempera offers durability, bright colors, and endless creative possibilities.
Most people's experience with tempera is a plastic bottle of school paint and a foam brush. That's about as representative of the medium as a crayon is of oil painting. Real tempera — egg tempera — is one of the oldest and most precise painting techniques in existence, and it produces results that no other medium can replicate.
Botticelli painted with it. Andrew Wyeth built his entire career on it. It dries in seconds, layers beautifully, and rewards patience with a luminous, matte finish that looks genuinely unlike anything else. Here's what it actually takes to get started.
The binder is the whole game. Traditional egg tempera uses egg yolk mixed with water — that's it. The yolk emulsifies the pigment, and as the water evaporates, the egg proteins cross-link into a film that's chemically stable for centuries. This is not a metaphor. Tempera panels from the 1300s are still intact.
The three things that trip up beginners are drying speed, consistency, and layering logic. Tempera dries in under a minute — sometimes in seconds — so you can't blend wet-into-wet the way you would with oil or even acrylic. Every stroke is essentially a commitment.
The consistency of your mixture also matters far more than in other mediums. Too much water and the binder breaks down, leaving chalky, fragile paint. Too little and the paint drags and clumps. Getting this ratio right — and keeping it right as the yolk ages — is the core skill of the medium.
Your first session will probably involve making the binder, panicking slightly when the paint dries before you're done with a stroke, and relearning everything you thought you knew about blending. That's normal and expected.
Start with a simple two-tone study on a small gessoed panel. Separate an egg yolk, pierce the sac, and let the yolk drain into a small jar. Add an equal amount of distilled water and stir. That's your binder. Mix in a small amount of dry pigment or squeeze paint until it reaches a creamy, slightly translucent consistency.
What surprises most beginners: the paint looks completely different wet versus dry. Colors shift lighter and slightly cooler as the water evaporates, so you have to mentally compensate while you work. The other surprise is how quickly you adapt — within 30 minutes, the fast drying time stops feeling like a bug and starts feeling like a feature.
What beginners consistently get wrong first: trying to rework wet areas. Tempera doesn't forgive scrubbing. Once a stroke is down and dry, you build over it — you don't push it around.
In oil painting, you blend transitions by pushing wet paint together. In watercolor, you chase the water. In tempera, you build optical blends through layered crosshatching — thousands of tiny parallel strokes laid at alternating angles, each one dry before the next goes down.
This is the central insight: tempera creates smooth gradations not through blending, but through the visual averaging of tiny marks. A shadow that looks seamlessly graduated up close is actually a grid of individually placed strokes. The eye does the blending.
This means the direction of your strokes isn't decorative — it's structural. Strokes parallel to a form's surface read differently than strokes perpendicular to it. Medieval icon painters understood this intuitively. Every mark was a deliberate modeling decision, not a gesture.
Once you internalize this, tempera stops feeling restrictive. The fast drying time becomes your friend — it forces you to work mark by mark, which is exactly how the medium builds its characteristic quiet glow.
A small set of artist-grade tube tempera or a handful of dry pigments, eggs from your fridge, a couple of round watercolor brushes, and a small gessoed panel or two of heavy watercolor paper. This gets you through real sessions — not toy painting.
Expand to a proper set of dry pigments (six to eight colors), a glass palette, a palette knife, small glass jars for storage, distilled water, and several gessoed birch panels in different sizes. At this level, you're working like the medium was designed to be worked.
A full pigment library, premium sable brushes (worth every cent for tempera's fine-stroke demands), custom-gessoed panels, archival varnish, and possibly a course in traditional technique. The materials cost stays low — it's the brushes and pigment quality that push the number up.
Round watercolor brushes (sizes 2 and 4): Soft, springy rounds give you the fine lines and controlled tip tempera demands. Cheap brushes will splay and frustrate you immediately.
Small gessoed panels or heavy watercolor paper (140lb+): Tempera needs a rigid, absorbent, smooth ground. Unprimed canvas or thin paper won't work.
Dry pigments or artist-grade tube tempera (six colors): A warm and cool version of red, blue, and yellow, plus titanium white and ivory black covers everything you need early on.
Distilled water: Tap water introduces minerals that can affect the binder over time. Distilled is cheap insurance.
Small glass jars with lids: For storing your binder and pre-mixed colors. Egg binder goes off within a day or two — small jars help you make just enough.
Sable brushes: Genuinely transformative for fine detail, but $30–$80 per brush. Wait until you've confirmed you love the medium.
Glass palette: Nice to have, easy to clean, but a ceramic plate works fine while you're learning.
Archival varnish: Only relevant once you're producing finished work you want to preserve. Skip entirely for practice pieces.
Custom-gessoed birch panels: Pre-made panels are fine for months. Building your own is a rabbit hole for when you're serious about archival quality.
With oil paint, the ground matters most. With watercolor, the paper weight is critical. With tempera, the variable that will make or break your work is your egg-to-water ratio — and almost every beginner gets it wrong in the same direction.
The default instinct is to add more water when paint feels too thick or dry — but overdiluting the binder means the egg protein film that forms as the paint cures becomes too thin to hold the pigment properly. The result is paint that looks fine initially but chalks off, cracks, or flakes within weeks.
The standard starting ratio is one part egg yolk to one part distilled water by volume. From there, you thin individual colors with additional water as needed — but keep that dilution modest. If your paint is spreading like water, you've gone too far.
Also worth knowing: egg yolk binder ferments. Make small batches at the start of each session and discard what's left. Adding a drop of white vinegar or a small piece of garlic (yes, this is historically documented) can slow the process, but fresh is always better.
Tempera instruction is less common than oil or watercolor, which means the quality range is wide. Use this checklist before signing up for anything.
The instructor works with actual egg tempera, not school-grade tube paint. These are fundamentally different materials. Make sure they're teaching the real thing.
They show their own work, not just student examples. An instructor who paints in the medium will have opinions about binder ratios, panel prep, and layering that you can only get from experience.
The class covers panel preparation, not just painting. Gesso application is part of the tempera process. Any course that skips ground preparation is skipping the foundation.
Crosshatching and layering get dedicated time. If the technique section is "paint thin layers and let them dry," that's not enough. The how of stroke-building is where the real instruction happens.
There's time for individual feedback, not just demonstration. Tempera problems are often binder problems or stroke problems that need a second set of eyes to diagnose. Group classes with no feedback time are mostly just company while you paint.
If tempera workshops aren't available locally, look at online courses through art schools or individual working artists. And if you're still exploring whether this is the right medium for you, the BB creative hobbies list is a good place to compare options side by side.
Tempera has a smaller community than oil or watercolor, but it's unusually dedicated. People who paint in egg tempera tend to be genuinely obsessed with it, which makes the community dense with hard-won knowledge.
Online, r/EggTempera on Reddit is active and technically focused — expect real conversations about pigment behavior and binder consistency, not just finished-work posts. The Wet Canvas forums have a dedicated tempera board with years of archived technique discussion worth digging through.
On YouTube, search for artists working in the Byzantine icon tradition — they typically use traditional egg tempera technique and often document their process in detail. Koo Schadler, who wrote the definitive English-language book on egg tempera, has lectures and interviews available online that are worth watching early.
In person, look for icon-painting workshops at religious art centers or Eastern Orthodox churches — they often teach egg tempera in its traditional form and are surprisingly welcoming to secular students. Local art guilds occasionally have tempera-specific interest groups, especially in cities with active plein air or representational painting scenes.
Give it 30 sessions before you decide. That's enough time for the fast drying to stop being a problem and start being a system.
By session 10, you should be making consistent binder batches without measuring and completing small studies in one sitting. If your paint is still flaking or your binder is still separating, focus here before moving on.
By session 20, you should be controlling your crosshatch direction deliberately and seeing a visible difference between your three-layer work and your ten-layer work. Gradations should be starting to look smooth from a normal viewing distance.
By session 30, you should have finished at least two pieces you'd keep, a clear sense of what subjects suit the medium's precision, and a binder ratio you trust.
Stop if the slow, methodical stroke-by-stroke process feels like constraint rather than focus after 20 sessions. Tempera genuinely doesn't suit people who want spontaneity or gestural freedom — and that's fine. Oil or acrylic will serve you better.
Keep going if you find yourself studying the light on objects and mentally calculating how many crosshatch layers it would take to build that shadow — and feeling pleased about the problem rather than daunted by it.
Oil Painting for Beginners — if the layering process appeals to you but you want more blending flexibility, oil is the natural next comparison.
Watercolor Painting for Beginners — shares tempera's water-based cleanup and thin-layer logic, but behaves very differently in practice.
Gouache Painting for Beginners — opaque, matte, and water-based like tempera, but far more forgiving and reworkable. Good to understand the difference.
Acrylic Painting for Beginners — fast-drying like tempera, but with a flexible film and more capacity for thick impasto. Worth comparing if you want more versatility.
BB Creative Hobbies List — the full rundown of creative mediums on BB if you're still weighing your options.
Tempera is a painting medium that uses pigments mixed with egg yolk as a binder, creating a fast-drying, vibrant finish. Unlike oils, tempera dries quickly without toxic fumes, and compared to acrylics, it offers a more matte appearance and traditional quality while being equally durable once dry.
A beginner tempera painting set typically costs $15–$40, with essential supplies like brushes, canvas or paper, and paint adding another $20–$50 total. You can start affordably with basic materials and upgrade as you develop your skills.
Tempera painting is one of the most beginner-friendly mediums because it requires minimal preparation, dries quickly, and is forgiving when you make mistakes. Most beginners can create satisfying results within their first few sessions with basic technique guidance.
Tempera paint typically dries within 30 minutes to 2 hours depending on humidity, temperature, and paint thickness. This fast drying time allows you to layer colors quickly and move on to new projects without extended waiting periods.
Tempera works on paper, cardboard, canvas, wood, and even fabric, making it versatile for various projects. Paper and cardboard are most common for beginners since they're affordable and require no special preparation.
Tempera can be used straight from the container or thinned with water to adjust consistency and transparency. Most beginners use it directly from the pot without additional mediums, making it simpler than oils or other advanced painting techniques.