Above: I decided to use some of the sketches I made at Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood for these paintings, created using the Mische technique.
The Mische technique sounded like such a bizarre thing to do that I had to try it. The name “Mische” means mixed in German and refers to using two different types of media; egg tempera and oil paints. The idea is that you paint the highlights and detail with egg tempera and use oil paint in a series of glazes (red, yellow and blue), before adding local colour on top to finish.

When I first read about it, my initial reaction was “What?!? You do what??”, as it seemed to involve painting the subject, obliterating most of what you’ve done with a glaze and then repainting it again on top. You do this not just once, but several times over. You’ll see what I mean if you visit my Mische Technique page.

I initially stumbled across it when I was looking for egg tempera recipes and discovered that it is a traditional technique that medieval and Renaissance artists used to create detailed paintings with rich depths of colour. Until that point I’d never heard of it. If ever you see the tag “oil paints and egg tempera” next to a painting in a museum it probably means that the artist used this technique. This method seems to attract artists who are interested in fantasy art and if you trawl the internet you will see lots of weird and wonderful examples of fairies, dragons and the like painted using the Mische technique.

I decided to create a painting from sketches and photographs I’d made at the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood. I’m particularly interested in creating a series of paintings with a seaside theme, so I’d made sketches of the Punch and Judy there. The detail of the puppets would lend itself well to this technique (or so I thought).

If you want to know more about this technique and my initial attempts, see my webpage http://www.how-to-be-a-bad-artist.com/mische.html.

You can also see this technique demonstrated on: http://www.brigidmarlin.com/Pages/Mische.html http://www.art4spirit.com/MischeTraditional.html