Materials, tools and techniques of Islamic artists

This lesson asks you to explore traditional and current materials, tools and techniques of visual artists and to adapt them in your own work. The museum offers only three examples from Islamic art, below; the materials in your studio and the current technologies come from your class. ¹

Look at how each record prepares its material before the art begins: grinding, pounding, cutting, inlaying. Note the steps and the order in which they come, and what each step protects or makes possible.

Choose one step and ask which current material or tool could do the same work. Say what would be gained and what would be lost.

The record on Persian pigments follows Norah Titley as she describes a colour before it reached the page. The mineral was ground to a soft powder on a hard stone, sifted, washed and mixed with egg-white, glue or gum arabic ². Early on albumen was used because it made paints resistant to water and damp, thinned with vitriol or alum, which gave early miniatures their enamel-like surface ². But albumen paints did not keep, and glue replaced it, causing colours such as crimson to stick to the facing page ². The steps come in an order: grind, sift, wash, bind.

Titley's account of the steps comes with her own judgement: she calls copper green "a conservationist's nightmare" ². Her book is the only source the pigments record cites for these steps. The record on inlaid metalwork rests on the Nuhad Es-Said collection booklet (Riyadh 1985), which describes the inlaying of brass and bronze with gold, silver and copper ^{3 4}. It does not describe how the inlay was cut, laid or fixed, so that step has to come from outside the museum's records.

Titley says albumen paints did not keep and glue replaced them, so that colours such as crimson stuck to the facing page ². Take a position and answer the strongest objection to it: was the change from egg-white to glue an improvement?

• Pigments and gold in Persian painting: the grinding, washing and binding of mineral colours, and the making of gold leaf.
• Inlaid metalwork: the metals, the black compound and the centres from Herat to Egypt.
• Calligrapher (khattat): the reed pen, the soot ink and the treated paper.

Read the record on pigments and gold in Persian painting and the one on inlaid metalwork. Draw the steps of one of them as a short sequence, and mark the step you would try first in your studio.