ELI5: What Is Tempera Painting?

Tempera painting is a special way of making art using paint made by mixing colorful dust with egg yolks.

Imagine you are baking a cake in your kitchen. To make the dry flour stick together, you crack an egg and mix it in. Tempera painting works almost the exact same way, but instead of baking a yummy treat, you are creating a picture.

Long before people could buy tubes of paint from a store, artists had to make their own colors using everyday things:

• Pigment: This is the color. Artists would crush up colorful rocks, dirt, or dried plants into a fine, powdery dust.
• Binder: This is the glue that holds the dust together. For tempera, the secret ingredient is the egg yolk from a regular chicken egg.

Because egg dries very quickly, painting with tempera is a lot like using quick-drying markers in your coloring book. Artists have to work fast and paint in tiny, thin lines. Once the egg dries, it becomes hard and tough, like the shiny shell of an M&M candy.

Even though it sounds strange to paint with your breakfast, this egg-paint lasts for a very long time. Many famous old paintings hanging in museums today were made with eggs hundreds of years ago, and their colors still look bright and fresh today.