A thangka is painted on cotton stretched on a frame, sized with chalk and hide glue, and burnished smooth. The composition is drawn first as a grid: the thig tshad, the system of proportion, measured in units of the figure’s own finger-width, that fixes the height of the face, the width of the shoulders and the placement of every feature. Only then is the figure drawn, the mineral pigments laid in flat, the shading and outlining added, and the gold applied last and burnished with an agate.
The three great schools, Menri from the fifteenth century, Khyenri from the same generation, and Karma Gadri from the sixteenth, differ in palette, in the treatment of landscape and in the vigour of their line, and a trained eye reads the school from across a room.
The pages here will present the grid figure by figure, the pigments and their preparation, the stages of work, the schools, and the iconography a painter must know.