Encaustic Journey

After last week's lecture on Encaustic painting we had a workshop. In groups of 4 we all gathered around the hot plates and started the process of melting wax and adding pigments and working with this new texture. New to us, this medium has been around three thousand years.

We also watch a video of a Canadian Artist who specializes in this medium you can see his work at : http://www.artnet.fr/artist/13203/jacques-payette.html

It is a fun technic that makes you feel like a kid again! You have to experiment with encaustic, get a feel for it, be adventurous and see where it will take you. I enjoyed the quick drying action and being able to melt it back to flatness and introducing hew colours or texture. You can scratch, melt, add and substract whatever; working with wax allows you to make mistakes because it is easily fixed.

My first try in class last Friday was very basic, I did not take a picture of it, but decided to work it over, I wiped it out and started fresh. Friday's class wasn't a waste, I got to work at home and did a scenery. It took me four hours to complete it, I think it is ok for my second try, much better than the first one.

I settled in the second kitchen in my home because it has a stove fan, and two windows and I turned this area into my personnal space. The house was meant to be a duplex but we use it all, I use two small rooms one is suppose to be a kitchen for upstairs and the other is a closed in porch lots of light in either rooms, but the porch gets cold in the winter.


Anyhow, the fan was nice to have. I used a small two burner stove and a hot gun. I melted the wax(microcrystalline mixed with carnauba) in a muffin pan and added the dry pigments to it. After wiping the panel clean I started to build up the background and started with mixing the sky working my way down the panel.


I really like working with this medium, you can really explore different texture effects. I believe this is something I will be experimenting with for a while.

Next Friday we will be working on our second panel and I will get to see what everone else has done. This is great fun!