Third in the series. I’m warming up to the technique. Pun intended. 🙂

A Piece of Me #23, encaustic on panel. 21 x 13.3 cm or 8 1/4 x 5 1/4 in.

Underdrawing for A Piece of Me #23.

But what that means is that I’m quickly learning all the tips and tricks I can use to manipulate this waxy paint. For example, I used an iron last time to to melt the paint back off, but then the melted paint stuck to the paper towel which then tore and left shreds on the panel. Not nice. I liked the texture of the paper towel embedded in the waxy paint but not the paper shreds. So today I switched to cheesecloth and had much better luck. It was very absorbent of the wax and left a nice weave pattern in the big open field of tinted yellow ochre. Cool. But then because the procedure had extracted a lot of paint, I painted some light yellow ochre back in to give it mass, then left it alone.

Mixing up the light tint of gray was the next challenge. I used mars black, which is a really neutral black but in the context of the yellow tonality it gets pushed to its complement. The light stripe of gray across the yellow expanse vibrates so very nicely. It’s similar in value but different in hue.

The pavement panels at the base are also tints of mars black, with a few sneaky strokes of burnt umber for spice. The inda ink underdrawing peeks through here and there. Finally I mixed up a darker tint of mars black for the strongest value, forming the meeting point between wall and earth. Ummmmm. I might just try to eat this one for dinner.

Description of the whole project here. Technical write up of using encaustic for an indirect painting technique here.