Painting a thangka is a trained discipline passed down within specific lineages, the Menri and Karma Gadri styles among the best documented, and a painter typically studies for years under a master before working independently, learning fixed proportional grids for each deity before ever mixing a color freely.
Materials and preparation
Cotton or silk canvas is stretched on a wooden frame and sized with a chalk and glue ground before any pigment touches it, and traditional colors are mineral, ground stone and earth pigments bound in animal hide glue, with gold detailing burnished after application, a slower and more expensive process than the synthetic pigments now common in commercial workshop production for the tourist trade.
Consecration, and what happens to a damaged one
A completed thangka is not considered fully active as a devotional object until a lama consecrates it, traditionally by writing mantra syllables on the back of the canvas where they will be hidden once the painting is mounted, a step that separates a devotional thangka from a decorative reproduction of the same image. A damaged thangka is repaired where the cloth allows it, and one damaged beyond repair is, in several traditions, retired with the same respect given to a worn out icon elsewhere in this atlas, ritually burned or set aside rather than discarded as ordinary cloth.