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. The museum links two records on how Persian painters prepared colours and copied shapes; the making stays with your class. The colours in the first record are historical materials, not for use in class. ¹

Look at the expectation: it asks you to match materials and methods to a challenge. Take one challenge, such as repeating a shape or making a colour last, and ask which material or technique in the records would help and what its cost is.

Here is how a Persian painter copied a design, as the record on pouncing gives it from Norah Titley. Transparent deerskin was laid over the original and its outline traced. The line was closely pricked with a fine needle, the pricked skin was laid on the paper, and charcoal was dabbed on it from a mesh bag ². Copies were also made by pricking round groups of figures in a manuscript painting itself. In the Tabriz Shahnama of 1536 the bystanders, not the main characters, were pricked ³. Mughal artists used pouncing too, and stencils were widely used for border designs in Iran, India and Turkey ³.

A black pool in a Persian painting can look like a deliberate choice of colour. The record on pigments gives Titley's explanation: silver, used in Persian painting for armour, weapons and water, almost always blackened by oxidation, hence the many black pools and streams in Persian miniatures ⁴.

Titley notes that compositions could be assembled from pounced details and figures taken from various manuscripts at the copier's whim, so that styles of different schools and periods may occur in one late sixteenth-century manuscript ². Is a copied figure evidence of the copier's own style or of the first painter's style, and what would you look for to decide?

• Pouncing in Persian painting: the deerskin, the needle and the mesh bag of charcoal, and the figures copied from one school to another.
• Pigments and gold in Persian painting: how colours were ground, washed and bound, and why silver turned black.

Read Persian painting: pigments and gold and Pouncing in Persian painting. Choose one technique and write the steps you would follow to try it with materials from your classroom.