Playing with Fire - Day 2 Encaustic Workshop

Adding Texture to the Encaustic Piece

Today we practiced adding texture - I'm amazed how thick these pieces can become.  Linda also demonstrated various ways to add line - from a Sharpie to a carbon disk to incising to scoring lines with a wooden skewer - the possibilities are endless BUT it is important to incise, score, etc. on a WARM board.  Carving lines into wax to fill with either ink, encaustic color or oil paint is difficult on a cold board.  How do I know this?

Adding Oil Glazes

Glazing any encaustic piece with oil is beautiful, but it really highlights and brings depth to a textured piece.  When you fuse the layer with heat, all kinds of unexpected things can happen when you don't know what you're doing....Linda above knows what she's doing.  I, on the other hand, had some interesting surprises...

Lynne Hardwick, Torch Song

We are all getting used to the blow torches - yesterday we were scared to look at it, today we can't live without it.

First Try - With Line and Texture Added

This is my piece from yesterday - my lines were either scored or incised (which is hard when the wax is cold...) and filled in with either black encaustic paint or india ink.  The I built up the random red  texture and also dry brushed the red encaustic around the edges of the piece.  You can build up the texture about 3 different times before you need to fuse it, and the trick in fusing the texture is to do it lightly so it doesn't flatten out the raised paint.

First Try - With Oil Glaze

I used black oil paint to glaze my "First Try" piece - this is really "hands on" because you put it on your finger and rub it around and into the crevices. (I did use a plastic glove but I still got oil paint all over myself). Then you either spray the piece with Pam oil spray or pour vegetable oil on it and use paper towels to take as much of the oil off as the artist wants.  (You would do well to own stock in paper towels.)

Encaustic is a wonderfully fun and exciting medium to paint in - tomorrow is our last day of the workshop - we are all sad about that but we'll be working to get Linda to return soon!