Procedures OF ICON PAINTIN

A contemporary iconographer speaking:



“To make an excellent icon, the icon-painter have to adhere to ancient methods. In old times, the standard background for icons was gold leaf or silver leaf. Gold being highly-priced, icon-painters usually used uncomplicated paints that had been cheap and made of organic components. Inside the poor village churches of Russian North, all the backgrounds have been carried out with paints of very light colour. ‘Fon,’ the Russian for background, just isn't a Russian word. Our icon-painters known as it ‘the light’. Priming for the panel was created of sturgeon glue, also a very high priced material. Well, in old occasions icons had been not cheap… “ (Father Zinon) Get more information about  www.st-alipy.ru



Icons are religious pictures painted on wooden panels, usually produced of linden or pine wood. Their production is really a long and complicated process. A layer of linen cloth soaked in sturgeon glue is put around the panel. The ground is made of chalk mixed with fish glue. That is gesso. As much as ten layers in the gesso are applied over the cloth, or pavoloka . An outline of your composition is incised on the gesso with all the point of a needle, usually according to an icon-painting manual.



To prepare tempera paints, mineral pigments are mixed with water and egg yolk. The typical minerals are cinnabar for reds, ochre (iron oxide) for yellows and lapis-lazuli for blues. All-natural minerals give transparency to colors. Transparency is key in building the effect of luminosity in icons. Light and dark tones of different thickness are brought one on best of the other, layer right after layer. The white ground reflects light falling on its surface back by means of the semi-transparent tempera. The effect is the fact that of inner light radiating from the image.



Immediately after painting is accomplished an icon is varnished with boiled linseed oil, olifa. Russian artists added amber to their olifa. The linseed-amber varnish protects icons from scratches and gives them a deeper tone. But, soon after a lot of years within a wood-heated church or inside a candle-lit ‘red’ corner of a peasant hut, the varnish becomes really dark and obscures the image. Inside the early twentieth century, to clean the old varnish off the icon surface, restorers used fire to soften the olifa. They put a bit alcohol around the surface of an icon and set it on fire. A restorer then was able to scrape off the olifa varnish and clean the icon.