About the Process

The steps of painting an Icon

The process of painting an icon is just as important as the result. Today people say that one should fast and pray before making an icon, but I’ll say that making the icon ought to be the prayer. There are shortcuts, ways to ease the effort, especially with modern materials, but along with the traditional process something essential is lost. People can see that the icons painted today don’t measure up to the ones painted centuries ago, but they can’t figure out why that is.

The Support

The support is made of poplar wood for its fine grain. It is dried well and braced with oak strips so as not to bend. The wood is covered with a traditional gesso made of chalk, marble dust and natural hide glue. No acrylic, all natural materials.

Gilding with Gold Leaf

Before any painting begins, the halo is gilt using 24K gold leaf. A water-based mixture of red clay bole and hide glue is used as an adhesive (see video). The bole is applied thickly with a brush, sanded when dry and then burnished by gently pressing a piece of agate stone over the surface. Burnishing turns the matte surface into a glossy one. The gold is attached by gently breathing on the bole, so that condensation from the breath adds a touch of moisture to activate the glue. The halo requires 2-3 layers of gold. The gold must be burnished after each layer to give it shine.

Handmade Egg Tempera

The paints are mixed by hand from powdered pigments and an egg yolk solution. Many traditional pigments were used instead of modern substitutes. This is what makes our icons different. Due to their wide availability and affordability, modern iconographers have embraced synthetic colors and use them without an awareness of how they change the palette. But these colors tend to have a caustic appearance and disrupt the color harmonies established through centuries of tradition.
We use real Lapis Lazuli, Azurite and Malachite. These are extracted from semiprecious stones and take a long time to prepare. The reds and purples incorporate madder lake and true vermillion. The yellows make use of orpiment, an arsenic-based color. Synthetic colors like cadmiums, pthalo or quinacridone are used sparingly if at all, and even then in mixtures or covered up by their natural counterparts.

Roskrish

Painting starts with a flat layer of dark, highly textured color. The texture symbolizes chaos . It is obtained by using coarse pigment and laying aqueous paint on the surface in “puddles” or lakes, a technique called “floating”. As the paint dries the uneven pigment is free to move in the emulsion creating these underlying patterns. The lines may be painted before or after applying the first layer. The lines represent the laws. They organize this chaos to create something from it. Out of this organized chaos comes the light.
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Highlights

The highlights are applied over the roskrish. They are thicker and more opaque. The first highlight is very broad and the following are narrower and narrower focusing on a light source that seems to glow within the surface. Each highlight is followed by a transparent float these are finer than the roskrish and more transparent. The floats unify the underlying layers, but also compensate for the loss of saturation when mixing white to the paint. Then comes another highlight and another float. There are three highlights and three floats in total.
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Varnishing with Olifa

The finished icon is varnished with an oil mixture that must be allowed several hours to penetrate through the layers of tempera down to the gesso, offering the painting equal durability to an oil painting. The varnish is called “olifa” and it is primarily thickened linseed oil. It must be allowed to cure for a couple of months, creating a durable surface with little or no shine.

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