Making Encaustic Paint

 

Damar Resin

 

Pure Beeswax Pellets

 

Using a scale to weigh the wax and resin

 

One part resin...

 

to eight part beeswax

 

Melt wax/resin on electric griddle set at 200º F.

 

Melted and mixed, but for the impurities from the resin

 

The impurities removed from the wax/resin mixture

Add oil paint

Mixed and cooling

 

Finished product ready to sliced of, melted and used

Inman Park Festival in Atlanta

This weekend I'll be at the Inman Park Festival in Atlanta. The parade alone, Saturday at 2:00, would be worth the trip. Fun, fun, fun!

The Masters Brush Cleaner and Preserver

I found the most fantastic brush cleaner by chance at Utrecht while I was standing at the register. It was there as an impulse buy and I impulsively bought it. It not only cleans and preserves paintbrushes, but will recondition that brush that you left out overnight. Then I got thinking, if it can clean dried paint off a brush, maybe it will take fried paint of clothing. Yup, it did, though with a little bit of scrubbing.  Check it out: The Masters Brush Cleaner and Preserver

Skyline [$75]

Red, always my favorite painting color. Unfortunately, it's not always easy to photograph. That said, I think this turned out to be true to the original.  It's completely palette knifed and has a lot of texture, especially at the horizon.  It's 12 x 12 x 1.5 and because of the gallery-depth canvas would not need framing.

I finished this encaustic weeks ago, but something about it wasn't quite right.  One good thing about encaustics is that, because it's wax, any time you want to change it, all you need is your heat gun.  So, today I decided to work with the clouds and I'm definitely glad that I did.  While there's always that fear that you'll mess up something that you really like, this was not the case here.

I added bold brushstrokes of white and then used the heat gun to carefully fuse wax and white pigment to the layers of wax beneath. All the while, diffusing the white and letting the blue show through to give them the airy look I was going for.  Anytime you liquify an area, you have to blend the surface in with the surrounding wax.  This got a little tricky when I was near the horizon, but a soft touch, something I'm not known for, made it work.

Here is the second sculpture that I received in a trade. Trading art at a show is a delicate situation. I've often been asked to swap before, but didn't want to.  In this case, I initiated the trade and was pleased that Lloyd Hughes, the metalsmith, was all for it. Below is what I bartered for these sculptures.  To me, it was the best kind of trade, a win-win.

This is one of the two sculptures that I swapped for at Artsapalooza in Atlanta.  They're both by Lloyd Hughes, a talented metalsmith from Lexington, Kentucky.  I'll post the other one tomorrow.