Fresh Snow! Fresh Glue.

Turn off the soundtrack, it is a distraction. Good directions. Fresh 

snow is the chill ingredient in the recipe given by Ralph Mayer in

 The Artist Handbook of Materials and Techniques. This glue stays sticky

for a long time. it has been written that if one lets the glare (egg glue) 

go rotten; it can be used on a dry oil painting for gilding or preparation

for painting with egg tempera. 

I have 7 12x14" stretched lightweight canvas to gild. There is freshly

made glare from Tuesday's snow in the fridge. There are 500

leaves of 6.24" x 6.24" aluminum leaf. A good day to prepare the 

canvas for drawing upon.

best and onward,
deb

Miscellaneous Notes: Recipe for making Litho Crayons

A recent guest of the nest arrived from a google search for a litho crayon recipe, one of my drawing tags is litho crayon, that's the link to the search result.  I thought the inquiry interesting enough to track down a recipe for making litho crayons.  My first handy reference, always in my studio at hand, is Ralph Mayer's 'handbook'.  The handbook is well indexed with 5 references for litho crayon under lithography.  There are numerous recipes under miscellaneous notes page 580-582  (fifth edition) for the making of litho crayons.  the basic ingredients are wax, soap, lamp black.  the recipe need not be exact.  the instructions are straight forward with excellent information about the properties of each ingredient.

I'm not a lithographer.  I use the crayons for drawing on paper and glass.  William Korn's litho crayons meet all of my needs, and they are graded.  i prefer #3 and #4.

Ralph Mayer's "The Artist's Handbook"

Uncle Steve gifted me with this book when I was 14 years old.  I never read it cover-to-cover until I was well out of art school and raising my daughter.  I was painting with casein paint, my daughter was 18 months old and got into my palette.  My painting abruptly stopped when she started making gagging sounds, turned around to find she had her tongue hanging out, covered in yellow casein.  She survived after much mouth washing, and was not poisoned, but...

This book taught me safe studio practices, the properties of dry pigments, what pigments are deadly (think cadmium, lead, heavy metals).  There are instructions for making slaked plaster, how to prepare a canvas, which paints should never be sanded, how to gild, where to get supplies.  20 years later, I purchased the up-dated guide.  If you are serious about your art and you are into experimenting with materials you have to use this book and learn how to be safe with your art materials.
best,
deb.