Last Thursday five art friends met at my garage to create encaustics together. Encaustic painting is an ancient medium in which pigment is mixed with bees wax and painted on wood or other porous surface. Here you see the bees wax and damar resin melting to create the encaustic medium. This is used in between each layer of color and it is also used as a base for the paint. Encaustic paint is made by mixing some of the medium and oil paint. We keep the color in small tins on an electric griddle.
One of the fun things about encaustic making is that you get to use an acetylene torch to melt the surface after each new layer. Sometimes, if a piece isn't coming together, you can coat it with shellac and set it on fire. Beautiful unplanned patterns and colors can emerge. In this picture, I let my piece burn a little too long and now it's mostly charred.
Ruth Ann blogged the blogger : )
No comments:
Post a Comment