A big hello to everyone! This is the first post of hopefully many about Encaustic Wax work. I'll be doing posts about this on Wednesdays for a bit, and just want to share my progression, processes and work with you. I'm SUPER EXCITED about wax, and I can't wait to start doing classes with it.
Back in the Spring when I attended the Collins Group Show, I took a class with
Purple Cows Wax. While I've worked with encaustic (to burn in) wax before, I've never used the colored pigmented waxes. I LOVED them! This is one of the pages I made in that class that got me hooked.
So I started experimenting myself a few weeks ago, and here is my first solo page on a piece of chipboard from
Maya Road. It's kid looking, but it was fun to try many techniques on this. I'll be showing you these techniques in the coming weeks. I made all of these in one day in a few hours time.
Using the Purple Cows Melt Craft Iron to make shapes and turn them in flowers. I wish you could feel the smoothness and texture on this. They are so simplistic but these were a good lesson learning how the Melt Iron works and all the attachments it comes with.
I also have an
Encaustic Painting Iron and after watching a zillion videos on
Encaustic.tv, I've been learning how to use it and to make scenes. I started with this basic mountains and ocean scene. Notice I burnt a mark in the paper...OOPS!!! By the way, I used
Tim Holtz's Disrtess Stamping Paper.
Learning to make skies, mountains, hills, and foliage was AWESOME!!! I shirked all my responsibilities on this day...no laundry, no cooking, no cleaning...only making scenes with hot wax!!! Here I used many techniques and then decided to use dropplets of hot wax as leaves on the tree I painted in with the wax.
More scenes...I guess I like trees...and this time I learned to make birds, and add more color mixtures.
I wanted this to be a masterpiece...WRONG!!! I wanted a gorgeous Autumn scene in the woods with Aspen trees and a path. I tried real hard, and it looked horrible, so I used my
Ranger Heat Tool to melt the wax further and blend it all, and I got a more abstract look. I thought it looked so much better this way! It's just so cool what wax does! And, it's been around for thousands of years and used by the Masters. Hopefully soon, I can gain some mastery of it.
Day 1 was certainly fun and very addicting. Please join me for day 2 next week, and let me know what you think so far!
