058v - - - - - Blacks
Black of charcoal from the mines, of ordinary charcoal, of burnt ivory, of peach stones, of lampblack, of burnt bones of the feet of oxen
Shadows
When you are making a painting with several persons, just as the flesh colors have to be different, so do the shadows.
In fresco
Azure is not good here, but bleak, & one needs to work with long longs pinceaux. Fresco is not used cont on wood
Azure
Turpentine oil renders it very beautiful. Assay palma christi seed oil. Walnut oil in Flanders costs at least a hundred sols a pint. The azure requires a little fatty oil because it has no body.
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Azur d’esmail hates more than any other to be ground, especially with water, for it dies & loses all its color. However, because it cannot be worked if it is coarse, grind not with water but with oil & grind it coarsely, and in this way it will not die as much.
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Always choose the most delicate one
Pinceaulx
When the color has dried inside, & you want to clean them, soak them in spike lavender oil and they immediately will turn soft again as before, then you will finish to clean them in some walnut oil. Walnut oilis not as not as appropriate to soften them as the spike lavender kind which is clear like water & penetrates & does not have body like walnut oil. The handle of pinceaulx is made by those who work with care from porcupine quills, by others from wood of arrows fromTurkey with whom with which they also make small rods to rest their hand when they are painting.
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To work well on a small scale very thin pinceaulx which have a firm point are needed. And because the hair taken from the tail of asquirrel’s fur is mollesin, the most careful take the bristles of the oldest rats, especially of dormice if they can find them & put two or three of them in the middle of the pinceau. These make a straight line like a quill & all the other hairs of the pinceau stick to them as to the point. The bristles of stone martens & weasels & small animals which make musk are even better, for a singlehair in a pinceau suffices.
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