Encaustic Painting

I enjoy painting in encaustic as a change from my regular oil painting.  This past week I worked in my garage creating some encaustics to take to First Friday in Chambersburg today.  It was a hot week to be working with heat producing tools, but I had a fun time.  You can see my set up here.  One table has the encaustic medium melted in an electric skillet and the other table has my griddle which I use for a palette.  Both tables are covered with aluminum foil.  If I need large quantities of a color, I make it in recycled cat food tins and melt them on the griddle.  If I just need a small amount, I use a palette knife and just mix oil paint and medium directly on the griddle.  Each layer is followed by a layer of medium and every layer is fused with the torch or heat gun.  I make my own medium by melting one part of damar resin with 8 parts of beeswax.  I get the wax from a local beekeeper and the damar resin from an ebay source.

Made Encaustics Today

Today I worked on encaustics in my garage set up. Here are the two that I completed. In the dark, textural one, I used many layers of color and applied black for the final layer. I pressed small items on, added encaustic color over them and then pulled off the items. Textures and impressions were left behind. Lace made an especially nice pattern.

In the red encaustic, I tossed many of the small items that I had pulled from the previous work. I embedded them in more medium and finished with a top layer of alizarin crimson. I used a small clay working tool to gouge lines into the red layer revealing the colors beneath.