Wax over watercolor
This is a REALLY bad photo - I’m having difficulty photographing encaustic pieces. Suggestions are welcome! I’m exploring different approaches and these four were all developed similarly.
With these pieces, I took portions of a watercolor painting and glued it to my wood support. Obviously, all these pieces came from the same painting. Then I lay a ground with wax medium and scrape it back to a smooth surface. Each of these were developed a slightly differently but basically, I was removing wax with various tools and replacing it with pigmented wax. After each session I added an isolating layer of wax medium, scraping back to as thin a layer as I could, and always fusing with a heat gun after each additional layer.
I worked one each of these 6”x 6” pieces for two or three days. There are probably at least ten to fifteen layers in each. It was helpful to work in a series so I could tweak the colors on my palette, using my paint more sparingly. Also I think I learn more about color by altering it gently —- sliding colors up and down the scale helps me understand what I’m doing with each addition of oil or encaustic paint.
I learned a lot from this project - I’m learning more about adding pigments to my wax medium to get the color I want. Also, scraping back is something I’ve had to get a “feel” for — similar to pulling a nice graded wash in watercolor, it is hard to explain and doing it over and over is the only way I’ve been able to learn. It also takes practice to avoid blooms, air bubbles, and structurally weak paintings.
I’m moving on to other ideas now but I’ll come back to this idea of building encaustic over watercolor.
