Materials and methods of the painter

This lesson asks you to use a variety of materials, tools, techniques and technologies to find solutions to design challenges. Making is your class's work; the museum links two records on how Persian painters prepared their colours and copied their outlines, for your class to learn from. The colours in the first record are historical materials, not for use in class. ¹

Look at the expectation: it asks you to choose materials, tools and techniques to meet a challenge. For each choice, ask what it makes possible, what can go wrong with it, and whether another choice would serve better.

The record on Persian painting reports how Norah Titley describes the making of gold leaf. Pieces of gold were placed between layers of deerskin, sometimes two hundred or more, and pounded thin ². The leaf was then rubbed or pounded with glue into a paste and put in water. The sediment was mixed with glue and saffron, brushed on and burnished with agate, and silver was added for a greenish gold ². Titley adds that the cost of pigments and gold was one reason only the greatest rulers could maintain academies ².

Gold leaf began as pieces of gold pounded between two hundred or more layers of deerskin ². When you choose a material for a design challenge, how much should the work of preparing it count, and what else would you weigh before you decide?

• Pigments and gold in Persian painting: how mineral colours were ground, washed and bound, and how gold leaf was made.
• Pouncing in Persian painting: how an outline was pricked through deerskin and dusted with charcoal to copy it.

Read Pigments and gold in Persian painting and Pouncing in Persian painting. Choose a design challenge of your own and list two materials or techniques from your classroom that you could use, with one advantage and one risk for each.