Encaustics Part 3: Painting

Part 1: Tools
Part2: Making Medium

Part 3 is here, Painting with your mediums!

There are many ways to paint with Encaustics. The most tutorialed was is the method of applying the wax to and Iron and then working it onto cards. If you go on youtube and search encaustic painting, you will get flooded with those tutorials. very few of them show how to do encaustics with brushes, and even less show the way you can do realism... that's another story. I've decided that that has to change. One day I'll tackle youtube, but for now, I'll show you here :p My focus lately has been on abstract. Maybe someday i'll gather more skills and tools and start doing real portraits, but ya, I enjoy doing abstract as a way of having more freedom from things like anatomy and structure since thats always my focus in animation and illustrations thatI do...
But I digress, lets move on.

First you have to gather your tools. In my picture I have my collapsable Winsor & Newton Easel, complete with wax drips all over it, my pucks of Medium, a metal bowl, brushes, paints, a surface (cradled panel), scraping tools, my hot palette and frying pan.







First thing to do is set up your hot Palette. However you do it. I set mine over 2 burners on my stove until I can get a real hot plate. My frying pan is my double boiler.








So once your medium is melted, you can start. I used 2 pucks on this painting. I melted , and just remoulded my left overs. you can always add more to the melting pot if you are running out. Spoon some of your melted medium into your mixing cup. I used a silicone muffin wrapper, not a great idea. Metal cups work better LOL. the flimsy sides are a little annoying. you can now colour your wax by either adding little blobs of paint in, or mixing in powdered pigments. In this case, I'm remelting a Puck I had already from my last painting. note, Powdered pigments, although they present that inhalation hazard, mix in much easier than oil paint.

You can start painting once your pigments mixed in, if you're brush is already hard with wax, just set it in your cup until it melts down and softens again. you will see, as you do each stroke, it hardness almost instantly. Each stoke will be exactly as you lay it down. I usually paint with the easel set upright, but for this tutorial I painted flat to make it easier to see. the light in my kitchen is wretched.

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Start painting! You can either do strokes as I've shown, you can dab it, you can spread it on with a knife, scrape, carve and manipulate the paint in anyway you want. In between layers, you need to fuse the layers with heat. that's where the Iron comes in. you can use the iron as much, or as little as you want. you really just have to heat enough to fuse the layers, you don't actually have to change the appearance. I used the heat to really blend my wax around and flatten out all the brush strokes. You can also use a heat gun to fuse. I found that i lacked patience for the heat gun as you need to use a very steady back and forth motion. I just blasted smoldering holes in my wax HA!
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So keep going, adding more layers, fusing in between, add some layers of light over dark, or dark over light, it will all work. You can see me building up layers of red and yellow (and even some plain unpigmented medium) in the next sequence of pictures.

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Inbetween each layer I took the iron, and fused and manipulated the wax. pulling the iron in different directions will pull the wax in different ways as well. Its important not to put too much pressure on the wax though, or you'll melt right back through to your panel. This iron is pretty heavy so its hard not to do that. a light iron is a benefit.
The last thing i did was drip that wonderful blue down the corner. I thought it needed something punchy on it, and I also wanted to show that you can use the properties of the wax in the way we are more familiar as well. the Drips are like my homage to the glorious wax that bees built for me :D


When you are done your painting, and its all cooled and dried, you can take a soft lint free cloth and buff your wax. Don't use the ass of a teddy bear though, it will leave balls of lint, especially if your medium has a high ratio of beeswax and is soft, it might still have sticky spots that cling to fuzz. Then you are done! take a good photo of it outdoors on a cloudy day and you will get a good photo of its true colours, then you can post it on Artician, or...I guess dA too if you wanted.

Next up, caring for, shipping and storing encaustic paintings. WOOT!