sketches from life

I'm taking a short break from work on a painting for class (due tomorrow! Yikes!), and I thought I'd come share a few things that I've been learning and working on lately. Namely, painting with encaustic.

Our last project in painting was to paint a small panel with encaustic. For those of you not familiar with the term, encaustic is basically painting with hot wax. It's mostly beeswax and pigment, and can give some really vibrant, beautiful colors. It's a very different medium, though, from anything else I've worked with, and it was really fun to experiment with it.
When painting with encaustic, you have to keep all the paints in liquid form by keeping them hot, so all the pots of color are kept on hot plates or griddles, and when you paint with it, it sets up very rapidly, since as soon as it begins to cool, it hardens and becomes more opaque. That being the case, you have to work pretty fast. What is fun about it, too, is how easily it takes to things like collage, transfer, and building up texture or layerss. You can incise lines into thick layers of wax and fill them with color, you can scrape away layers to reveal what's underneath, or you can attach globs of warm wax to build up semi-sculptural aspects on a piece.

The pieces we did were small, and mostly, I believe, just for the experience of working with the new medium, but it was really fun to play around with. People who know what they're doing with the medium can really do some cool things with it, too. It's also interesting to note that encaustic is incredibly archival and will last for incredible lengths of time as long as it is not exposed to enough heat to melt the wax. We know it has been in use since the time of the Ancient Egyptians, who used it to create mummy portraits. Cool!