Friday, January 22, 2010

The Makings of an Encaustic Painting


I thought I would show you the steps I take to make one of my encaustic paintings. The "canvas" of the painting needs to be stable. A piece of wood works great. I make a lot of 5 inch x 5 inch x 2 inch paintings for my Etsy shop. This painting is on a larger piece of wood it measures 10 inches x 10 inches x 3/4 inch.

 I cover the wood in layers of wax. There are about 6 layers of white encaustic wax on this piece of wood. Between each layer, I use a heat gun and heat the wax. Melting the wax fuses the layers of wax together.



For this painting I have add two bird images and a bit of pink wax to the white wax. My bird images are image transfers. These transfers are made from my photographs. To make these transfers I make black and white copy of the image then use an acetone image transfer technique. I added a heart, but I didn't like how it looked so it is not in the finished piece.


After I add the birds and branches, I paint on some more white encaustic wax and once again  heat with a heat gun. While the wax is warm, I add gold leaf flakes. I then use an electric batik tool to make the pink and white dots.

 

4 comments:

  1. I'm so glad you showed us this - it's absolutely fascinating. Have a lovely weekend

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks you so much for the demonstration of how you do your encaustic artwork. I want to do some this spring.

    Have a great weekend.

    I am looking at my precious green tree from you right now. It sits on my desk.

    ReplyDelete
  3. thanks for this, i love seeing artists techniques

    ReplyDelete
  4. I should have read further... Great information.
    xx,
    Autumn Clark

    ReplyDelete

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...