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i kept adding blue. i mixed up some cobalt to go over all the ultramarine i’d already used. i was trying to build it up so i could make it drip later. or something. until after this point i hadn’t used any heat on my painting. it’s all been with paste wax so far. the extra thick blue was the last thing i did before bed. i was kind of liking the scumbling effect.
next morning, i decided i needed more color on the face. so i put raw umber, and some of the caput mortum i had on the palette. but being morning and me being fresh and having thought about my work all night, i grabbed a hair dryer next thing, and hit those blue tendrils.
well that was cool. the blue, being fresh, meaning having a lot of turpentine in it, melted at a very low temperature and ran like crazy. gravity controlled the flow. there were funny air currents from the hair dryer, such that a backflow occurred that crept against the flow of wind.
i begin to see why people like encaustic. yesterday, when it was just wax paste and pigment on a brush or at best a palette knife, it felt more like working with crayons than serious art.
but with a hair dryer, or later rigged, a heat lamp, wax does what it’s supposed to do, and bubbles up and runs.
it also changes color. the white becomes translucent, and the yellow turns brown. i’m not even using a heat gun. but the damned heat lamp is very hot, and melts things almost instantly.
i don’t know how much to melt things. i don’t know when to melt or even if i should melt. it matters how long you let it sit before hitting it with heat, it matters if the turpentine has all evaporated. as with everything, the importnat variations are endless.
now that i’m heating it,tho, i’m a good deal happier with what i’m doing. it’s in the ugly stages, tho, and hard to live with. but i’ve painted enough to know that the ugly stage is fleeting if you keep working at it.
isn’t this cool? melted crayons are an entirely different animal than just crayons.
i added more yellow to the hands and scales and face and eyes. i added more red to the mane and neck. then i melted it, below.
then i put a coat of clear wax paste over the green and put it aside to see what happens when a thick coat of wax paste sets up.
i’ve found out that the longer you let the paste dry, the longer and hotter it takes the hair dryer in order for it to melt and move.
there are varying stages of move, as well, from rounding the lumps and streaks of wax from the brush, to making the lump bloom and sweel, to making it collapse into liquid and go streaming away from the site. after that it sizzles, and sometimes it gets dark.
i’m a lot happier with my progress once heat got into the picture.
i decided that i need to be working on several paintings at once so that i don’t hurry thru the drying and then frying stage with the heat lamp. so i dug thru my pictures and came up with a koi photograph that i painted when i first started painting in oils, back in 1999.
i’ll post that tomorrow.
oopsie, i forgot to take this out of draft and publish it. it’s the first part of the first encaustic i’ve done. i started with a drawing of a dragon jim idid for another project, and traced it onto about 8×10 canvas glued onto a masonite board. very heavy.
first and a half stage
i’m using wax paste and pigment, put on with a brush. the dragon’s head is napthol red and indian red, the claws and scales are raw sienna and a little white. i’ve started turning the tendrils blue. the background is green oxide in the diluted wax paste.
second stage and three quarters
i’ve started putting white in. i repainted the background using green oxide and hansa yellow. at this point i’m beginning to feel the old frustration. i hate white. white makes everything look pasty.
i used a pallette knife to put white on the teeth, and to adjust where the teeth went. i was still accidently putting my wrist into the teeth several hours later.it was still wet.
i’m wondering what kind of painting i’m doing. it doesn’t look real, even tho it looks dimensional already. maybe when i’m doing self portraits or still lives it’ll start looking real. i don’t do well with fantasy when i’m just learning a new medium. i do better being faithful to what it looks like.
i’m painting with wax right now. evidently you’re supposed to use heat when you do encaustic, but jim remembers being taught how to do encaustic cold, with solvents, and knows artists who went their entire careers doing encaustic paintings with cold wax.
so he mixed me up a jar of beeswax shavings and turpentine, and now i have a heavy gel that i’ve been mixing with my pigments and painting on with a brush.
something else that’s never done, not only am i not working with gloves and a respirator (they recommend fume hoods and glove boxes), but i’m working with little piles of pigment sitting out there on the pallette waiting to be mixed into the wax paste. i’m doing all the health standard no-nos, everything except smoking, eating, and drinking in the studio. and actually i’m doing one or more of those as well. but i haven’t dipped my paintbrush into my coffee yet. so there.
third and a half stage
i’ve started getting bold. i decided that just having a head hanging there in space wasn’t good enough when i could clearly see the ghostof a neck curving out into the picture, so i gathered up some of the ochre and umber, and some of the hansa yellow, and some of the naphtol red, and started putting it down thickly with the wax paste. this stuff really gets impasto.
i’m loving this. it’s like using crayons really heavily. i’m not seeing any translucency yet, but the colors blend well, and they get nice and deep.
i’m hoping to be able to make the tendrils a real deep blue that shines out, and have a lot of work to do getting the neck looking right.
fourth stage
tomorrow i need to dampen down the background some, need to reshape the claws, need to shape the mane of tendrils and the body behind it. the jaw needs resculpturing and the lip line needs to be brought down a bit on top.
the more i paint on here, the thicker it gets. the thicker the strokes i put on compared to how i started. like i get more sure and bold, or too enthusiastic and ruin things, depending on your viewpoint.
or is it a function of the paint layers and my impatience? when i worked at cafe tu-tu tango and had 4 hours to finish a 14×20 oil painting, i would have real trouble near the end getting the paint to show up against all the layers underneath. it got really goopy and the paint went on reluctantly unless it was way thicker than what i was putting it down into. it got kind of like that tonight, except that the layers, most of them, were dry to the touch when i went back into it.
being mixed with turpentine, which evaporates in a hurry, the wax can be brushed on in many different thicknesses, which will harden up as the turpentine evaporates out of it. so by tomorrow i expect even the thick stuff to feel like wax insted of mayonnaise.
jim is fixing to order some microcrystalline wax, because he thinks he’ll like the qualities it gives to beeswax. we’re going for a pound, and looking for the best price on 10 lbs of beeswax. we’re both getting into encaustic in a big way.
every year i make a batch or two of scarves, with dyes on silk. they’re habotai scarves, 11×60, and i sell them around atlanta, and give them away as xmas presents.
i’ve been painting on silk since 2003, and my designs have gotten progressively more colorful. they’ve never been precise, i’m more interested in the happy accident and the leakage of color than i am with straight lines and other boundaries.
this year, to an unprecedented extent, my husband jim is designing most of my fall line (i almost need to put quotes around that). he started out several years ago designing a dragon scarf, and then a snake one, and then i had him do me a dragon for a kimono, and a stream and crane for another kimono, and now i’ve got him drawing fairies and toadstools, and fish and seaweed, and sea turtles in the ocean. and he’s just asked me to cut 4 more templates so he can do designs he hasn’t even thought up yet. (paisley)
i’m making the scarves in batches of four each design. i’m saving the templates. each set is more wonderful than the last. he’s drawn me some real works of art, and these will be my top of the line scarves.
he’ll help me with the wall hangings when i get around to making them.
so here are some of my new fall collection. i’m still in production; i bring the week’s output into my class on thursdays, and i’d like to enthuse about how i got some effect but they’re still grasping the basics so i’ll try to tone it down.
but how can you not be enthusiastic about designs like these?
these are this year’s dragon design. i use karo syrup resist for the scales and spines, and salt in the background.
this is fish floating around among seaweed fronds.
these are portraits of a pair of russian blues that i originally did as a present for my friend gretchen, their mom.
detail. they adopted a stuffed floppy dog to sleep on, showing the natural domination of species.
but wait. there’s more. i haven’t taken pictures yet but each one is more beautiful than the last.
a collection of recent fabric work, mainly so you don’t have to scroll endlessly thru posts.
jim. makes anything look good.
part of my vast sewing empire.
3 kimono finally finished. it always takes twice as long.
if it fits me, it will fit her.
jim’s designs are so nice i started making scarves with them.
sudie is my little king charles spaniel.
tumbles is my kid allison’s maltese.
smudge and schuyler don’t think i make a mess.
a good cast is best repeated.
by the way, i took some handmade paper and made wrapping paper she can iron out if she wants, and get framed.
the dragon in silk kimono, silk scarf, and pastel on paper.
ensemble suggestion: use scarf as obi.
the stream and crane in pastel on paper, silk scarf, and silk kimono.
crane and stream, pastel on paper.
