Or this?

I had such a good time at the encaustic class this morning. We had a bit of drama when the instructor didn’t show up on time. I finally found her phone and called her. She was in a taxi on her way because her car was stolen over night. Thankfully, she had not packed all of her supplies.

I am not sure which orientation I like for the piece up there. It is the second piece that I did. You can click on images to see them larger.

Here is the first which has collaged items.

But, let me start at the beginning. This is a butane torch which is an essential tool!

First, you have a painting board on which you layer plain beeswax.

Then, it is fused to the board using the torch. You build up a few layers, this way.

You can smooth put waxy bumps with this tool.

Next, you start painting on the wax layers.

And fuse them.

It is fun to see how you can move the wax around with the torch and get an interesting surface.

Once you get the background, you can start adding collage items, such as a photo.

Here is Serena’s final collage sample that she demonstrated for us. The writing is done with a special wax  crayon.

Time to work on our own. I grabbed this sheet of laser printed photos. I liked the architectural photos which would look good with some of my fabric bits.

Here is my base of colors before I started collaging. You can see some of my fabrics bits. It went through several layers and waxings to get the final piece which is up above.

For my second piece, I wanted to do some scratching through the surface to reveal black wax so I painted a black wax base first.

Then I forgot to photograph any more! But you can see the end result up above. I kept adding lines of color and when they were cool, I used a clay carving tool to scratch into the surface and then went at it with the torch.

I really love that piece as I had an idea of what I wanted to do and pretty much achieved it.

Here is a display of all of the work. As you can see most people did collages except for Jonathon and I!

Here is Jonathon’s small landscape and he did the abstract blue and white with the nice brush strokes.

This was so much fun. I hope to take another class. I am not sure I want to invest in all the stuff until I decide rather this is a new medium for me.