I wish I had a really awesome example of the technique I learned during class last night, but I have to confess, I struggled a bit. Encaustic really is so different from any other medium.
I knew this one that I worked on last week wasn’t quite finished. I wasn’t sure what to do with it, but I thought it would make a nice experimental piece for the line technique we learned.
The tools we used for this were clay carving tools- awls to draw the lines in the wax, and scrapers to scrape off the excess was.
Basically, you paint a few layers of clear wax over the place you want your lines, plus a little extra to protect the edges from excess paint. You need to wait for it to cool down a bit before you continue, so patience is required. (I found this out the hard way, as I’ll show you soon.) For the lines on this piece, I used a rather thick-ended tool, and simply dug the lines all the way to the wood. When you draw into the wax like that, you’ll get a lip on the edge of your lines that I found I needed to let cool a little bit longer for the technique to work the best.
Choose the color you want your lines to be, and paint over the recesses, making sure the wax settles all the way in. Again, let it cool. The next part is the toughest part, at least for me. This is where your patience will really pay off. :) You need to scrape the excess wax off your piece. You can see in my picture above- the bottom circle has the wax on because I haven’t drawn my lines, but the top circle has been scraped, as have the lines on the right side, though there’s still some clear wax there that I could scrape off if I wanted to.
Scraping the layers of wax was the tough part for me. I would either push too hard, or get caught in an uneven part and rip up the wax almost to the wood. I had to redo parts of my piece and draw the lines again to get it right, but that is one good thing about encaustic- it’s easy to redo something.
It was frustrating at first, but once I understood the need to take my time and be very gentle, the going got much easier. I had tricked myself since I went so fast last week, but different techniques require different mind sets and skills.
This was my second attempt, and I was disappointed in myself because I had a clear idea in my head what I wanted it to look like, and it didn’t turn out like that. What I needed to do was sketch it out beforehand. I’ll probably end up doing that tonight, preparing for a second attempt. :) The stars I added in the left corner were tougher than the lines- you really need to make sure you get the wax all the way in, and give it plenty of time to cool as well as be very gentle when you scrape off the wax.
This one is not done, but I thought I’d leave it like this so you could see the scrape lines and digs.
So, this is a technique I will for sure need to practice, but were doing rice paper next week. :) Hopefully I’ll have the line technique down before then.
Just one more thought to share. I had a hard day yesterday, and was in a fairly bad mood before my class. I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to concentrate, but as soon as I started pulling out my tools, I forgot what it was I was worrying about, and focused completely on my art. It really felt like therapy, relaxing and satisfying, to be working on new things. The funny thing is, I almost talked myself out of going to class, and realized once I was there that going was the best thing I could have done for myself that day. So don’t let a cloudy day drain your enthusiasm. Your art will help lift you out of it. :)
