Happy Easter
March 29, 2018
As children, we loved writing on eggs with crayon and then colouring them, the smell of vinegar used in setting the dyes filling the kitchen, and our fingers almost permanently stained purple and orange and green–yet we weren’t very keen on then having to eat cold hard-boiled eggs, pretty though they were. Our mother held a big church breakfast at our parsonage home, card tables decorated up, little ‘favour’ cups filled with mints and peanuts, lots of hot chocolate for people returning from sunrise service. And of course, lots of coloured, hard-boiled eggs.
I enjoy painting watercolour on eggs, which receive it quite well, the best eggs being duck eggs whose satin-smooth surface is perfect for watercolour. The eggs then have to be blown out and finally spray-lacquered to protect them.
Christmas tree ornament egg done using the traditional Ukrainian beeswax and dye method.
‘Little Bunny’, watercolour on Saunders Waterford Hot Press Paper, 4″x6″, sold.
‘Arctic Hare’, watercolour, Arches Aquarelle Hot Press Paper, 4″x6″, sold.
A blessed and Happy Easter everyone!
eggs as canvas ….
May 5, 2015
DUCK EGGS ARE THE BEST for receiving watercolour pigment. They have a satiny shell surface. Chicken eggs are better if one is using the ancient Ukrainian Orthodox, bees wax, kitska stylus, and dye method.
Chicken eggs have a kind of chalky, calcium-like surface which, yes, can be painted, but feels like the cheaper version of a duck egg. [Oh my, that probably tops your abstruse observation quota for today] Ahem….plowing-on into the arcane . . . a duck egg is more forgiving a surface because removing mistakes is easily accomplished using a Q-tip.
(above) Chicken Egg Christmas ornament using bees wax, Ukrainian kistka stylus and traditional dyes
Watercolour Painted Eggs, (four duck eggs, one goose egg)
Hand-painted Christmas Egg Ornaments, watercolour, with multiple, clear fixative layers applied for protection.
The impetus for exploring eggs as a painting surface came from my having seen, as a child, hand-painted blown eggs with Spring flowers on them, gathered and hung by streams of ribbon for an Easter breakfast within our German church. Their beauty gave me new eyes and I viewed my grade school wax crayon attempts with a certain childish contempt. And it perplexes me still, that such a long ago vision remained an artistic impulse to do for myself what I saw modelled back then.
What has put my egg art enjoyment on (permanent?) hold is my having received two Peacock eggs that I delayed blowing-out….only to have them explode all over the walls and ceiling just as I was finally drifting off to sleep one night, months after they were given to me.
You seriously do not want to know the level of grossness — the vile, rank, and utter foulness — of having to clean up an entire living room punctuated, peppered, with rotten Peacock egg at one o’clock in the morning.
My childhood vision of hand-painted Easter eggs has been forever cataracted by the Peacock eggs from hell.
weisserwatercolours 