Today, we learned how to paint using Tempra on a wood panel. Renaissance artists would paint using Tempra, an egg yolk-based paint, before oil paints were widely available. We painted the Lily of Florence, and surrounded it with a gold foil background.
This experience was challenging, because I am not artistically inclined and rarely work that part of my brain. Don’t get me wrong, I had a blast pushing my artistic limits to try and create the perfect shading for the Lily! Through this experience, I realized how similar engineering and art are. Creating the paint using egg yolk and the proper pigment is an engineering-esque experiment. The precision, time, and focus it takes to complete just a simple symbol was more than I imagined. Starting from scratch, with just an image in your mind or a reference image must take extreme patience, thought, and experimentation.
I think that art and engineering education should be taught more hand-in-hand. Engineers have to think out complex problems, similar to how artists have to think out complex designs. Even more so connected are engineering and architecture, as architecture has to be beautiful and functional, like Brunelleschi’s dome. I think practicing both parts of the brain, and expanding views and ideas of both, would be incredibly beneficial to engineering education. Having a way to express yourself and your ideas is very important, regardless of if you are or think you are “good” at art or not. I think that integrating art and engineering would be a cool way to learn!
Swanson School of Engineering 