AisA Academy

My encaustic set-up August 14, 2009

Here’s a few photos to show the simple set up I have—just in case you want to “try this at home.”  I also can’t recommend enough Lisa’s series on encaustic techniques over at Open Studio. She taught me the basics to get me started.

I bought the claybords from Blick Art Materials.

The wax and paint I bought from R&F Paints.

For the summer, my son is borrowing the palette, heat gun and some brushes from his school’s art teacher. I am taking advantage of that since a palette can cost close to $300 if you include the thermometer. another alternative is to use a $30 griddle from some place like Target or amazon.com, but the surface is black and makes the colors harder to see.

My son did the initial set up so he could watch TV while he worked.  I would have set it up to look out our window at the ocean, but otherwise I like his set up.

Note the heat resistant table top and lots of paper towels.

Heat gun, my paint box and a close up of the palette and brushes.

The small bread pan holds paraffin for cleaning the brushes between colors, and the larger pan holds clear bees wax or medium. (Medium is a mix of bees wax and damar –a tree resin which serves to harden and stabilize the wax.) The thermometer is to help you keep the palette at around 220 degrees–hot enough to keep the wax melted without scorching or burning.

I buy my brushes at our local hardware store which is the place in our small town that sells art supplies. Once you dip them in the wax though, don’t expect to use them for anything else!! Another tip is not to use plain aluminum or iron pans as they will discolor the wax over time.  Galvanized steel is ok.

I think that’s is for now. Off to more painting!

Calla Lily #4 August 13, 2009

Ooo boy. I learned on this one!

Here’s what I started from, a photo with a coat of clear wax on top.

Once again, I painted the black background first:

And then the flower and leaves:

I then fused the wax with a heat gun.  As I had learned before–but forgot to apply the knowledge this time–the white takes longer to melt, so by the time I had it sufficiently melted, the rest had flowed and distorted.

I didn’t like the results, so I simply placed the painting face down on the palette and melted the wax off back down to the photo.  Now I could start over, and without the layer of clear wax which tends to increase the tendency of the colors to flow and distort. I also painted and fused the white paint before painting any of the other colors. Here is what it looked like with the flower fused, and the black painted but not yet fused.

After fusing the whole painting, I still was not satisfied, so I did some touch up and gently refused several times.  Here’s the final result. It is my least favorite of the series. The thin stalks were hard to keep straight and the leaves dominate over the flower. If I make another attempt, I will put fewer contrasting colors in the leaves to avoid the distraction it makes and enlarge the white flower top to make it more of the central eye-catcher.

What did I learn?

Do not put a layer of clear wax between the photo and the pigmented wax.

Be sure to paint and fuse the white paint first.

Pay attention to the overall balance in the image so that the less important parts don’t visually dominate.

Post series: New Project,   Calla Lily #2,  Calla Lily #3,  Calla Lily #4,  Back to Encaustics

Calla Lily #3 July 30, 2009

This morning I played hooky from packing for a camping trip in order to  to work on my calla lily series.  I really want more time to myself these days–and it was a pleasant treat to squeeze this in.

Yet another technique variation–though this didn’t occur on purpose.  After my first calla lily encaustic, I embedded three other photos as prep to painting over them.  Here is currently what 2 of them look like:

The third I can’t show you because it is what I painted over.  Yesterday’s painting had no overcoat of clear wax. Instead, once I had pressed the photo onto a bed of wax, I used the encaustic paints directly on the photo. Today, there was a coat of clear wax upon which I put the color. When I went to fuse the layers with the heat gun, the clear wax underneath also melted–and as pigment is denser than the wax, the clear wax has a tendency to float to the top disrupting the color in odd places. I had to do a lot of touch up to the black areas…which made the surface irregular…which required more melting to smooth it out. This made the colors of the flower melt more and loose some of their definition. The end result is irregular, but still rather striking (or at least I think so.)

This time I also tried painting all the white areas first, and them doing a preliminary fusing. This is because white melts at a higher temperature. Yesterday I had trouble with the other colors getting too runny and starting to flow into each other before the white was sufficiently melted.  Getting the right sequence of colors and melting will take some experience.

The other struggle I had was trying to get a good photo of my end result. Because the surface still is not very smooth, the ambient light catches in odd spots and reflecting back to create areas of white where there really are none on the piece.  If I take the photo in  low light, the result is grainy.  Using a flash is a disaster.

Here’s the best I could accomplish–with the original photo on the right for comparison:

The camera is doing some funny things to the colors because in the actual painting, the leaves are much more green and less yellow which is more pleasing to me.

There are some other tricks in encaustic which I can experiment with–like carving into a ground layer of wax (that’s called intarsia), then filling in the carved areas by painting over them with another color and finally scraping away the excess (see Lisa’s explanation here on Intarsia.) But for now, I will forge ahead on this series, concentrating on color mixing and the sequence of my fusings.

Post series: New Project,   Calla Lily #2,  Calla Lily #3,  Calla Lily #4,  Back to Encaustics