How to Use tempera in a Sentence

tempera

noun
  • Use a paintbrush or your finger to cover the egg with tempera paint.
    Annabelle Canela, Parents, 16 Apr. 2025
  • Use a paintbrush or your finger to cover the egg with tempera paint.
    Annabelle Canela, Parents, 14 Mar. 2026
  • Someone had crudely daubed the keys with red and yellow tempera paint.
    John Kelly, Washington Post, 2 July 2017
  • So, what made tempera reign supreme among the Renaissance giants?
    Elizabeth Gamillo, Smithsonian Magazine, 9 Dec. 2021
  • For these experiments, the researchers made their own egg tempera.
    Eva Amsen, Forbes, 12 Apr. 2022
  • The work is mostly made with tempera, but oil paint has been used for the background and some secondary elements.
    Jacopo Prisco, CNN, 28 Mar. 2023
  • The artist works most frequently with diluted oil paints but sometimes shifts to fast-drying egg tempera.
    Mark Jenkins, Washington Post, 29 Sep. 2023
  • On view in the show are 79 prints, watercolors and paintings in tempera on paper.
    Steven Litt, cleveland, 14 Mar. 2021
  • Acrylics, watercolors, and tempera paint are also suitable for kids.
    Jennifer Blair, chicagotribune.com, 22 Dec. 2020
  • Artists can bring other art materials such as pastels, tempera paint, tape, stencil.
    Kristi Nix, Houston Chronicle, 22 Aug. 2019
  • Parents can turn prevention into a fun family project by taking a chalk pen or tempera paints and drawing on windows.
    Christina Tkacik, Howard County Times, 3 May 2018
  • The decision to paint with tempera, the same medium used to create those Arabic maps, proved fortuitous.
    Zoe Si, New Yorker, 19 Dec. 2025
  • Holi Hands Gather a variety of colored tempera paints and a few paintbrushes.
    Christina Montoya Fiedler, Woman's Day, 24 Feb. 2023
  • The penguins dip their feet into the washable tempera paint and run amock over the canvases, adding their personal, creative touches.
    Kelsey Grey, idahostatesman, 19 June 2018
  • These were spurred in part by the growing use of oil paint over egg tempera, which allowed for more lavish colors and textures — all the better to depict the one percent.
    Roberta Smith, New York Times, 24 June 2021
  • Paints and Brushes You can regularly find acrylic or tempera paint in a variety of colors.
    Kathy Barnes, Better Homes & Gardens, 1 Sep. 2025
  • The team's egg tempera also provided more coverage and elasticity as well.
    Elizabeth Gamillo, Smithsonian Magazine, 9 Dec. 2021
  • Using the classical egg tempera method of painting, de la Hoz explored a range of concepts and characters in the series.
    San Diego Union-Tribune, 10 July 2022
  • Layered hues from green through shades of golden ocher down to umber—in classic tempera painting, this would be exactly the understructure for (white) skin tones.
    Moritz Scheper, Artforum, 1 Sep. 2024
  • A number of the pieces on display – including works in tempera, gouache, acrylic, oil, pencil, pen, and fiber – have rarely been seen outside private collections.
    Mackenzie Farkus, Christian Science Monitor, 2 May 2025
  • This morning, while my partner took a work call, my children dumped six large bottles of tempera paint all over our rug, sofa and dining table, extending to the bathroom and kitchen.
    Kevin Noble Maillard, New York Times, 20 Mar. 2020
  • The scenery is similar in both kinds of paintings, but where the oils have an Olympian detachment, the tempera ones pull the eye across the vastness and into curves of land and curls of clouds.
    Mark Jenkins, Washington Post, 29 Sep. 2023
  • Oils, temperas and charcoals will mingle to create a distinctive depiction of Southern Chile.
    Holly Jones, Variety, 30 Oct. 2023
  • For this Easter egg painting project, simply find several colors of washable tempera paint and ½-inch-wide flat paintbrushes, then go wild with designs!
    Emily Vanschmus, Better Homes & Gardens, 20 Oct. 2022
  • They were known as masters of the new medium of oil painting, which allowed unprecedented levels of refined detail, as compared to the older medium egg tempera.
    Benjamin Lima, Dallas News, 11 Mar. 2023
  • Trumbull created the effect in a huge aquarium tank filled with fresh and saltwater and by injecting white liquid tempera paint to create the strange cloud formations.
    Rhett Bartlett, The Hollywood Reporter, 8 Feb. 2022
  • So understated are these frames that one’s attention remains firmly on the works themselves, with their bright egg-tempera colors and their first steps toward naturalism.
    Cammy Brothers, WSJ, 1 Aug. 2018
  • Because Giampietrino used oil paint on canvas, as opposed to Leonardo's tempera and oil paint on a dry wall, the proxy has withstood the test of time much better than the original work.
    Courtney Linder, Popular Mechanics, 22 June 2020
  • The 1893 version in the Oslo museum’s collection, painted in tempera with pastels, is the original.
    Nora McGreevy, Smithsonian Magazine, 24 Feb. 2021
  • In Andy’s studio, a bowl of deep purple mussel shells stained with paint sit on a table next to an easel; Wyeth mixed his delicate egg tempera pigments in those shells, which lent them their preternatural tones.
    Murray Whyte, BostonGlobe.com, 4 Aug. 2022

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'tempera.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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