Raleigh, NC has a pretty awesome artistic community. Not that I’ve broken into it quite yet (that plan is in the works) but I’m scratching the surface. For example, Raleigh City has a lot of art classes available for anyone who wants to learn, and I recently signed up for the Beginner’s Encaustic class.
The word encaustic is derived from the Greek word enkaiein, which means “to burn into”. It has come to include all forms of painting with a mixture of beeswax and pigment. The Greeks first began using mixtures of wax and resin to preserve the wood in their ships. From there, they began adding pigments and using the wax not only to preserve, but to decorate. Homer even mentions the painted ships of the Greeks who fought at Troy.
http://www.encaustic.ca/html/history.html#first
I first saw this technique over a year ago in a small gallery in Chapel Hill, NC. I had never heard of it, but I fell in love with the look that the artist was able to achieve. I wrote the word “encaustic” in my handy dandy notebook for future reference. Now I am pleased to say that I have completed my first encaustic paintings.
I started out with a 6*6 piece of 1/2 inch plywood. Home Depot will cut bigger pieces of wood for free, so you can get a lot of pieces for the price of a single sheet. I’m pretty sure Lowes will do this too, or any hardware store.
I believe you can do the encaustic technique on other surfaces, but it’s much trickier and you would need encaustic gesso and a good deal of experimenting. :)
The basic technique required just a few things- Wax with some damar resin mixed in, pigment, tin cans to hold the hot wax, a griddle or some kind of heat source for the wax tins to sit on to stay warm, brushes, a heat gun, and of course your wood board.
The pigment blocks I got at Jerry’s were already mixed with some encaustic medium, so they were like colored wax blocks, though still very concentrated. You can cut the pigment with some more encaustic medium to thin out the color so it lasts longer. You really don’t need it to be more concentrated than half wax medium/half pigment. Once all your wax and pigment are melted and mixed, you can start painting! Just start brushing the wax onto your board. Because it is wax, it dries very quickly, so it’s a technique that takes some getting used to, but it is so fun.Now, the trickier part is fusing each layer together. All of the layers of wax need to be fused together for your piece to be complete and ready to last for years. For the one I have pictured above, I used my white wax to cover the entire board, then added layers of black and white in the middle. After each application, I had to fuse the top layer of wax to the layer underneath it, so that when I was finished my whole piece would be one fused layer of wax. This is where your heat gun comes in. Our instructor has a pretty awesome heat gun that has different heat and air settings. It’s a little easier I suppose to use that type of gun, because depending on the the effect you want, you’ll need different heat and air values. I have been using my own embossing gun that I’ve had for years and used for my scrapbook pages. The only thing it has is an on/off switch, so I wasn’t sure how well it was going to work. I must say, it has fulfilled it’s duties admirably so far.
Just a warning, this is where the encaustic technique gets a little more intuitive. It’s going to take a bit more practice for me to get it down, because if you heat the wax to long and too hard, it will run together and all the colors will mix. You can do that a little if you want- that’s how I achieved the swirly mix in my black and white piece, but you don’t want to do it too long. You do, however, need to make sure you heat it well enough to fuse the wax layers. Also, If you hold the gun over the same spot too long, eventually the wax will be pushed aside and the wood will be exposed. So take some time to get used to the way the heat manipulates the wax. It’s a lot of fun to see pieces come together. :)
This was just our first class- don’t worry, I’ll tell you about all the techniques we learn. Next week were doing line technique, and eventually we’ll work with stencils, fabric, paper, found objects, etc. I’m so excited!!
Our instructor gave us the option of using her supplies for the class, or purchasing our own. I opted to get my own because I’m planning on making encaustics a staple of my art, and I didn’t want to pay her to use her supplies and then just buy everything anyway. Of course, the wax and the pigment I got at Jerry’s Artarama was very expensive, even after the 20% off they’ve been doing for encaustic pigments. After doing some research, I realized that if you’re serious about encaustics, it would be far cheaper to look elsewhere and/or mix things yourself.
What you can do is buy pure beeswax and damar resin separately, and then mix them together on your own instead of buying it ready made. I found a store in Lakewood, WA that sells encaustic supplies. Swan Candles has wax, pigments, tools, etc. I ordered some of their encaustic medium and some pigments. Their premixed encaustic medium is about 15.00 for a pound. I bought less than a pound of medium at jerry’s last night for almost 30 dollars. I also factored that if I bought the purified white beeswax and damar resins separately from swans, it would factor out to be about 8 dollars a pound if I mixed the medium myself. A pound for 8.00 vs. less than a pound for nearly 30? It seems like a no-brainer. Of course, I haven’t used Swans supplies yet. I’m getting them in the mail today, so once I have them I can see how the two products compare. Although I have a hunch that I’ll be buying more from Swan’s in the future.
http://www.swanscandles.com/store/encausticsupplies.html – This is the link to their store.
I’m going to be having a lot of fun over the next few weeks. I’m probably going to have to get some more wood. Of course, now I’m wondering if I’ll get my front room cleared out by Easter. Somehow, I don’t think so.
