Got up early this morning, of course. Made a batch of encaustic medium and paint in some colors i want to play with. believe it or not, this took about two hours, minus a ciggy here and a moutain dew there. next time i do it, i’ll take some pictures of the process. i made some clear cakes, english red, yellow ochre, golden yellow ochre and some other color that escapes me as i sit here typing.
encaustic is a very old, yea, ancient, technique for creating art. there are still encaustic pieces in the tombs of egypt and the old masters frequently used the technique. encaustic is a mixture of beeswax and damar resin, though some people use only beeswax and there is a snooty debate over if that is really encaustic. the value of damar is that it raises the melting point for the wax and hardens it a bit. the resin has bits of tree bark still in there so that combined with the wax makes it seem a really organic process. i was worried this time because the resin got a bit foamy? when i was heating it but i decided to keep going and somehow, it all came out normal. though, we’ll see what happens when i use it. this time, i changed the recipe and used 2:8 resin to beeswax. previously i used 1:9.
some people do really amazing paintings with it but i will be doing mixed media stuff, maybe transferring into the wax, maybe burning shellac on top and throw in a bit of micra here and there. we’ll see. i am very optimistic when i set out but wax has a mind of it’s own to some degree and we’re still learning the dance.
