Journal to a Muse

More Time Flying

I have been taking an on-line class about encaustic painting from Judy Wise. I have been keeping night owl hours as a result, and sleeping through some lovely fall mornings. But boy is it fun. So much experimentation. So little perfectionism!

Every day she posts a video demonstration of one or two techniques. I really like how she has compartmentalized them so we can learn "one thing at a time." Of course artists are always mixing things up... so some pieces have ten "techniques" in them while others might just have one. Until you have done lots of wax work, I don't think you can tell which are complex and which are simple... let alone which ones take a long time to do.

The top one is my most recent effort. The vertical lines are actually pieces of knotted embroidery thread tacked with wax to paper which was waxed to wood. The "dots" at the top were dots of colored wax (imagine a rainbow of measles), which were then surrounded by and covered over by white wax. THEN, I scraped thin layers of wax away, which revealed the "dots" as circles, ovals and sometimes just little organic blobs. The bottom of the piece was done by gouging lines into the wax, filling them in with greens and yellows and then scraping off (most) of the excess so that it looked a little like grass.
This is a paper heart doily painted in reds and pinks on the BACK side, then adhered to paper on a board. As hoped, some of those colors oozed up through the paper, where I lightly brushed more wax, letting the texture build up. I need to practice this technique because it all sort of melted together more than I wanted it to. But to keep the idea of texture, I mooshed some beads into the soft wax and covered them over so they'll stick forever. There's also some oil pastel under some clear wax at the very bottom.
Combined scraping (excavation) and texture build up (accretion) with translucent layers under, between and over.