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thirteen’s a lucky number. here is a picture of the finished photo, taken outdoors and auto adjusted. i like it.
well, i’m going to call it done. i stuck a little green over the rocks on the bottom, and that might be enough. i’ll go take a photo (when it stops raining) in natural light, and post that just so you can see what i’m seeing.
but i’m pretty much done now.
what’s next?
it’s not over yet. i actually signed it last night, but then i sat back and looked at it, and it still needs more work. i managed to put a veil of white over the dry rocks in the foreground, and took another photo.
most of what i did yesterday involved burning the hell out of the painting. i took a really long time on the blue reflections, making fist-sized pools of absolutely molten wax, trying to move the white particles out of the way and let the underlying darks come thru. it’s an act of patience and faith to leave a heat lamp over a molten pool of wax. it starts moving and you don’t even see it. i had dreams about it later.
and this was effective. but then i had to go back in with some light gray/brown (white and raw umber, makes a bluish gray until i added more umber, and then it was brown). i put it on the rocks that aren’t covered by reflections. and then i put it on some of the rocks that are covered by reflections. i put a thin wash of raw unber over the yellow reflection of the tree trunk on the right, because it was just too stark before.
after i stuck the veil over the dry rocks the composition looked better, because those rocks are markedly different from all the other rocks simply because they’re dry. in this photo the contrast still isn’t good enough, and i may have to put on another veil. what i still have to do in the water is to coat out the bottom (the part that isn’t huge giant rocks but sort of sandy bottom) with a blue gray and burn it again. the area in the middle of the darkness on the right, and the area beneath the enormous rock ledge at the top left of the painting need this.
but this is an entire day’s work, so it looks like there’ll be an 11th or even 12th post.
and then, it’s getting on for november and i’ll be starting my novel for national novel writing month, so it may be that i wont be starting on another painting for awhile. on the other hand, i’ll be making headway on my mom’s quilt. at any rate, i’ll report it here, and you can check out my fiction if you want to.
wow. ten posts and i’m still not finished. today i did a bit of an experiment. i’m starting to not like what i’m doing, because it’s not like what i wanted, or what the reference photo looks like. but i haven’t gotten tired of messing with it yet.
today i got out the really thin black paint and put the dark lines back in with a finger. i love painting with my hands. i kept leaving fingerprints, which melt differently than just random blobs of paint. how chuck close. how da vinci.
after burning in the darks, i looked at it and could see nothing else to do, so i prepared to put on a layer of clear wax. that is, wax with no pigment. first i took my big jar of yellow beeswax and citrus solvent, thinned it out with more citrus oil, and then slapped it on a corner of the painting. i burned it in immediately, because it really burns in faster and easier if you do it while it’s still wet. here’s the before and after on this:
fresh wax paste
burned in wax
i’m struggling with the chemistry of the wax. when wax is melted and mixed with solvent, when cooled, what state is the wax in? is it a solid? is it a liquid? technically you could call my encaustic medium “paste wax.” what state is paste wax? solid? liquid? slush? is it tiny little pieces of beeswax in a solid state suspended in solvent? does the solvent melt the wax and hold it in a liquid state? these nitpicky little determinations are important. if it’s a liquid, then the job of melting it is easier. if it’s a liquid, then the bonding problems that exist with poorly-burned-in was aren’t as pressing. if the solvent acts to dissolve the layer beneath the newly laid-on wax, then it creates a bond, and burning in becomes less important.
jim was taught encaustic back in the 60s using cold wax (wax mixed with turpentine). jasper johns and others experimented with it. they didn’t like using turpentine as a solvent, because it offgasses toxicity. but they didn’t have orange oil back then. orange oil – d-limonene – is so nontoxic that i can sit in offgassing citrus fumes all day long and not even get a scratchy throat. the jar of white wax i ended up using today was originally mixed up with odorless mineral spirits and citrus oil, and i could really tell the difference. i came away from my painting session, after having burned in a layer of clear wax over the entire 700+ square inches, with a raw throat and mild asthma. this was due to the odorless mineral spirits, used in making early batches of encaustic medium due to jim’s mistaken belief that just because it’s odorless, it’s harmless. which isn’t true. odorless mineral spirits is merely petroleum solvent. it’s like inhaling gasoline.
so. i had a corner of the painting covered with yellow beeswax, and when i burned it in, it stayed yellow and not very translucent at all. i sat there looking at it, dismayed, and finally went up and scraped it all off with a palette knife. it was still warm, so i could do this. the layers beneath hadn’t warmed up enough to stay warm after taking the lights off, but the top layer of clear wax was still warm to the touch and wet feeling in my hand once i’d scraped it off.
okay, start over. i got out a jar of bleached beeswax that jim had done up months ago. it was the only jar left of bleached white and citrus oil, with some mineral spirits because jim was trying to save a buck before i educated him about petroleum spirits. we have other jars of white wax, but they’re jim’s, because he’s very fond of using bleached (food grade) microcrystalline wax, which is a petroleum product. i won’t use it. it doesn’t smell like beeswax.
so. jar of bleached beeswax. i thinned it with citrus oil, and then slapped it down on the board and burned it in. for this burning in, i actually wanted the paint to move, so i took my time and heated it up slowly with my hand-held heat lamp (flood light, really, only i’m using a grow light because it’s less intense than a floodlight and i don’t need to wear sunglasses). i held the lamp farther away from the surface than i usually do – about 3″, and moved it over a wider area. i was trying to heat the wax at depth, in order to get the dark outlines of the rocks to reassert themselves.
for some reason, perhaps the thickness of the wax, the lower layers didn’t want to move. the clear wax flowed and ran, but the colors underneath didn’t budge. which was not what i was expecting or hoping for. only when the entire area became molten at a deep level did the wax start to move. and then it was like a stream, the whole fist-sized area began to flow gently toward the edge of the board. usually when wax starts to move, all i have to do is raise the heat lamp and blow on it, and the wax snaps back and freezes. but when it’s all melted like this, blowing on it just moves it more, and i have to wait for the wax at depth to cool, which takes a long time. i can visualize a small painting with its entire surface molten and beginning to shift. perhaps i’ll play with that soon.
i didn’t want to put the clear wax on the entire painting at the time, so i did it in sections, melting each edge together as i joined sections. when i got done with melting this fairly thick layer of wax, some areas felt soapy and wet to the touch, even when cooled. i knew these weren’t melted enough. the area was more translucent than well-melted (and cooled) wax, stickier, with little bubbles in it. so i went back over it until i saw the wax move. interestingly, i saw little tiny bubbles moving around inside the molten wax, like little tiny pearls. they didn’t pop or come to the surface, they just rolled around in the liquid wax.
so now i’ve got clear wax over the entire painting, except for the dry rocks. i still have to do something to make them look more lifelike (probably a veil, meaning a coat of really thin white, to obscure the details and garishness of the color). and then maybe i’m done. it’s still different than i had in mind, but that’s art for you. all the happy surprises.
tomorrow.
my, this is taking a long time.
and it’s getting further and further from what i wanted.
today we had a visitor, and then i had a fight with my kid, and didn’t get to the studio until after 5, so only had enough time to put on a layer of raw sienna over the water without reflections. i was hoping to lighten the bottom. and now what i’m missing is the dark of the lines around the rocks. so i’m going to put that in tomorrow, and perhaps then can i put on a layer or two of clear wax and start making some of those blue reflections get more transparent so that you can see the bottom thru the reflection.
that’s perhaps going to be difficult, but i don’t know yet, because i’m still unsure about how white acts when heated. i’m expecting the parts overlaying the dark lines to break up and boil first, because the black underneath is quicker to heat than the lighter colors. again, i don’t know. and like i said yesterday, if it comes to that, i’m willing to scrape back some of the paint. but i’m hoping i can burn thru it instead.
the color balance on my photoshop isn’t showing the blueness of the reflections. i’ll have to shoot it outside tomorrow. that’ll eliminate the flash in the middle, as well.
today i reinforced the blue reflections everywhere, and then put a layer of wax and raw umber over all the non-reflective places. once i burned it in it looked a little deeper, a little more convincing. the reflection of the tree trunk is nice, but there needs to be some darker reflections of the branches as well. tomorrow i guess i’ll do something about the dry rock in the foreground (a veil of some version of white), and some lightening in the underwater rocks. and then i’ll slap a coat of clear wax on top and burn that in. and then touch up stuff, and maybe another coat of clear wax and i’ll be done.
i just got some really reasonable ($3.75/lb) unfiltered beeswax from elbert honey company. i got five pounds of honey as well, really nice. the beeswax smells great, and has little bee parts in it, which is what i wanted. i actually asked phil, the guy, if they didn’t have any really dirty beeswax, but all they had was the stuff they melt themselves, and it’s quite clear, except for a little brown scum on the bottom. but i’m delighted. so tomorrow i’m probably going to melt it and mix it with orange oil ( to make my version of encaustic medium) and put it into jars so i can use it real soon now on something where the beeswax is featured more than pigment. one of those abstract mostly wax paintings, where the romance of the wax is what’s important, rather than the quality of the painting or the exactness of the representation.
but for now, to bed. it’s been an emotionally harrowing day, and i’m going to bed now.
i sure am taking my time about this painting. today i went down and made up some very white blue paint and spread it over the sky reflections i’ve already put in. i was very careful, again, not to burn holes in the white paint, and it stuck together wonderfully. i anticipate putting a coat or two of pure wax on after this, and only then letting the dark burn thru.
but isn’t it pasty, and can you think it’s surface reflections? i don’t know yet. it keeps getting further from what i was envisioning. i could end up scraping and otherwise attacking the surface if all else fails. stay tuned.
i didn’t get to do much yesterday. but what i did do made a huge difference. but first of all, i lied about what i was going to do next. when i left the studio the night before last, i had in mind to complete the bottom the next day, and only then start on the reflections. but when i got down there yesterday afternoon, i decided to go ahead with the first layers of reflection. so sue me.
first i took some light blue paint that i’d been saving under a glass on my palette. i do this alot, saving paint from one painting to the next. i find it hard to throw away perfectly good pain just because ‘m finished with something. so i put the blue paint on where the reflections of the sky will go. and it was way too dark. there’s not enough contrast between the bottom and the surface to even be able to tell where i’ve got the blue.
i scumbled on the blue, to begin with , and burned it in. and the white in the mix started to tear apart immediately, of course. i kind of knew it would, so i didn’t go too far in heating up this layer of wax. it was apparent to me that i was going to have to put on another coat of blue, and much lighter. but in the meantime i wanted to get past the careful outlining of the rocks i’d been doing, and wanted to put a little atmosphere into it.
so i mixed up a very light batch of paint (meaning i used very little pigment and loads of wax, and thinned it down with orange oil until it was easily spreadable. i mixed in some white, added some cream colored paint i’d already mixed, stuck a little raw umber into it. it was a gray brown, and more waxy than painty. then i plopped several huge palette knives full of this paint onto the board. it landed with a very satisfying plop. spreading it with a palette knife was going to be difficult. i’d just bought a huge palette knife, but it would have spread the wax in a scumbling way (that is, leaving huge gaps between bits of paint) and i didn’t want that, so i discarded the knife and spread the paint with my hands. i love that part.
at that point i had to leave the studio for the day, and so i only melted a little bit of the new layer before it dried. so yesterday morning i came back into the studio and resumed burning in, which took forever because i only use a heat lamp and not a torch, which blows the was off the board if not handled properly.
when i was done melting in, i noticed that the water was now much more obscured than it had been. i had to be very careful melting this layer because of the white in it. i wanted it to melt as one sheet, and not break up, and over the dark lines it was very difficult to keep the white from bubbling open and letting the dark come thru. however, close up it looks marvelous. and after a few more layers the bubbling will be widespread. i just thought i’d limit it at the beginning.
i’m going to deal with the cloudiness of the water later. first i’m going to put on the brighter sky reflections, and burn that in. and then perhaps i’m going to have to lay in some raw umber over the shadowed parts of the water. and maybe i’m going to have to restate some of the lines, and put some highlights on some of the underwater rocks. time will tell, and at this point it’s a question of balancing the elements rather than being a slave to the photo.
one thing i did do, however, was deal with the foreground rocks. they needed to be more brown than pink, so i mixed up some burnt sienna and slapped it on, and then burnt it in, mainly on the bit of rock that’s just barely underwater, but i used some burnt sienna over some of the black lines on the dry rock, too. and then i put another coat of the light wax i’d stuck over the water, back over the foreground rock so it would still look underwater.
anyway, it’s rather a mess at this point, but the more i look at it the better it gets.
that’s always been my goal in painting. i want the scene to look so real you can walk out into it. but not to make it look like a photo. there are other kinds of real.
youtube is a source for demos of encaustic. here’s a selection:
look what a heat gun does to the wax. it heats it way too fast for my comfort, and blows it all over the place. i don’t like the way it reminds me of those whirling paint thingies.
you can paint with a little tiny iron you can order.
you can paint with an electric stylus you can order.
using an airgun you can order does drive home the concept that it’s not how you put the wax on that’s important, it’s what happens when you fuse it.
you can use an incredibly tiny pen point if you want to be really exacting, however.
or use a really teensy brush and get one, maybe two strokes in before having to recharge the brush.
torches, electric blades you can order, all sorts of techniques. it’s dizzying.
that’s enough now. what happened in the studio today? first i stuck a layer of quinacridone gold and white on the foreground rocks. it’s got to go sienna tomorrow.
then i decided after looking at it for awhile that most of the rocks were the same size. my reference photo shows strategically placed rocks that are larger than the main size, which is smallish. that’s helpful. so i went in and corrected the strategic rocks, slapping green in an arc over the original black line of the rock. burned in, i mixed up another grayed brown, and took some of my remaining pinkish, and did the other rock colors back over the places that needed it, and then burned in the bigger rocks.
i still need to outline the bigger rocks in black since i covered that over. i went over all the dark spots with black again, applied with a finger, and managed to film some of these finger smears melting. i’ve got a short video of it here and a longer one here. they show the wax going molten and beginning to spread, and then when he heat lamp is withdrawn, the wax snaps back into its original shape.
i seem to be into encaustic for the subtle blending and the in-between states of a slow melt, the evolution of movement. i’m really floored by the effects of heat guns and torches. compared to what they do, using a heat lamp’ s like the moment of beginning to act on the impulse to move, where the results of a torch is like full-blown flight. i wonder what long, slow heating would produce, like a light suspended from 6 inches for 10 minutes or so.
in silk dyeing, using sugar syrup resist, it’s possible to extend the curling blending effect of bleeding dye, keep it developing for hours. slow heating might allow the paint to find new channels really slowly and avoid blending and churning…my arm would fall off, i’d have to suspend it. i saw contraptions above peoples’ electric skillets in their studios. oh duh, those were jury rigged vent hoods so they don’t inhale fumes. anyway, it wouldn’t be hard to rig a light at whatever height i’d need. it would take a week to burn in a large painting, i’d guess.
i can see what i need to do tomorrow. one more day of working under water, and then i can put on the water itself, painting in the surface details, the reflections. but the bottom has to be real, and it’s not yet. for instance, can you look at it and believe that the bottom is about eight feet away, at least six feet? that’s why it has no color. those rocks are as red as the dry rocks, but the water blocks all the warmer colors, so even tho the water is clear as a bell, it’s also much deeper than it looks even when you’re standing there. and so cool. sugar hollow is my favorite place on earth, one of them.
today i didn’t have much time in the studio. i thought i’d get much more done than i did. but we went to an art opening this evening, and got up late, and all sorts of things happened that i forget about. the phone still doesn’t work, tho.
i’d left the fresh wax paint on the board last night, without burning it in. i’d layered in green, then purple, and then a grayed tan, and then left it on the board to dry overnight. usually i slap on a fresh coat of paint and hit it with a heat lamp while it’s still wet. this time i had a dry wax layer to reheat and melt into the layer below. this turned out to be quite a bitch.
using citrus oil to thin the wax is really beneficial to the burning in process. thinning the wax reduces the melting point, because when i put it on the painting it’s near liquid as makes no difference, and melts right away. it only melts to a certain point, tho, as the citrus oil evaporates off. there’s a little space of time where the wax has slumped, but the oil has off-gassed, and the wax that’s left hasn’t yet reached its melting point, so you have a little space of time where nothing happens, after a certain amount of melting has occurred. this is the time when the layer you’re burning in has a chance to melt and flow over the layer beneath without the layer beneath melting. you can see where the new stroke of wax is a little raised above the was beneath, and gradually the edges melt and it flows out. and at that point the wax it’s flowing on starts to melt. so it gives you a rather long time to work with your layer of almost molten wax, compared to it all being dried and cold and heating up at the same rate as the layers beneath.
it took forever to burn in that 700+ square inch board. at least an hour. i stopped for coffee, and it was orange flavored. i was reading where they’re using d-limonene in heartburn treatments. and it has cancer preventative qualities. it makes me hungry.
after burning it in, over lunch, i sat and looked at my painting for awhile. it’s still flat, you can’t tell there’s any depth in the water, and you can’t tell that the picture travels across the bottom of the river. it looks more like a wall than a stretch of ground with water flowing over it. the only good thing i found about it was that the green i used is exactly the green of the river bottom.
i discovered a lot about my subject by staring at it for several days. the first thing i discovered was that my drawing skills suck. when i draw in a photograph, which is how i compose paintings, not being able to improve on life, i start with representative marks spaced all over the canvas, placemarks for the features of the landscape. slashes, curves and dots. then i connect these marks with an overall drawing, and then further refine it until everything is accounted for. then add paint and build a composition.
the trouble with this is that even tho all the features get represented in the painting, they’re not necessarily to scale. i’ll have a passage that looks like what it is, and then things will get all squinched up in a corner, and in the other corner i’ll have to make shit up to fill the open spaces. when i painted my monumental picture of new york city i had to erase and redraw the composition four times. it was a very large painting for a watercolor, and i tried different approaches to the drawing – starting at the bottom, starting at the sides, starting at the top. everything ended up off scale and ridiculous looking. i got really frustrated. finally i just attacked it one day and got really into the relationships between buildings and angles and distances and shadows and negative shapes. and it worked.
but i didn’t do that in this painting. i figured that if i got everything in there, even if the scale fluctuated thruout the painting, then it would look okay and nobody would notice anyway. and since you’ll never see the reference picture, you’ll never notice. please leave a comment if you do…
i turned the painting upside down and looked at it for awhile. i can see awkwardness easier that way. also looking at it in a mirror. it helps alot.
i’m not seeing any depth, but i did figure out why there’s only red rock in the foreground – it’s because there’s loads of depth, and the color is leached out of all but the highest rocks, which is what i’m standing on when i took the picture.
what i ended up doing after burning in that vast expanse was to go back in with that really thin black, spreading it with a finger, putting it on the deeper shadows. i burned this in, and then was a little more satisfied. but what a short work session it felt like.
more today.
