"Mind Your Own Beeswax" Workshop last Sunday

We had seven participants at Sunday's encaustic workshop, "Mind Your Own Beeswax." We met at Julia Gardner's studio at Troy Studios. Thanks so much to Julia for lending her studio!

Left, Bridget chooses colors, Tristen affixes collage, Nell dips a paper image in wax prior to collaging. Julia is in the background.







Here's one of Janene's encaustic collages, in progress and finished. I love how she jumbled the number images up in the finished piece and deepened the color with encaustic glazes. And, ooh-la, la, there's the Tour d' Eiffel, from my fabulous French find.



Encaustic is notoriously difficult to photograph especially in poor light. Below is just an idea of Bridget's rich piece. She experimented with some rich gray, green, and blue glazes, layering with clear glaze in between in layer of encaustic paint. She decided the result was too opaque, so she pushed some of the wax back with a heat gun, leaving translucent places that added interest and subtlety to the piece.













The equipment we used included: one electric frypan, an electric griddle, an embossing gun, a propane torch, lots of scrapers, incising tools, beeswax, damar resin, cat food tins, and brushes. For supports we used Claybord panels and wood panels. Oh yes, and nail polish remover for photo transfers. The variety of work that come from these basic tools was amazing!



Here's one of Tristen's beautiful golden encaustic collages. (Everyone at the workshop was especially interested in learning about using collage with encaustic medium and techniques.) Tristen used lots of clear layers with her painted ones, and used scraping at the end to reveal earlier layers.













Nell used delicate and careful incising techniques to create the freeform design at the bottom of this gorgeous piece.

She incised the spiral and X lines, then painted them over with white encaustic paint. She then slowly scraped off the white paint, which remained only in the incised areas.














Nell uses a pottery tool to scrape back some of the wax on her piece in progress, before adding new elements.
















Laura's delicate and graceful encaustic collage. She used the scraping technique to reveal layers, creating a feeling of mystery. This piece includes laser photo transfers.






















Karen Joy torches away on this complex and fascinating piece. Here she's using the torch to reveal earlier layers of clear encaustic, creating a kind of halo around her collage image.



Thanks to all the participants for Minding Your Beeswax!