A Piece of Me #48, encaustic on panel over collage. 21 x 13.3 cm or 5 1/4 x 8 1/4 in.

A Piece of Me #48, underdrawing in pen and ink.

An abstract floor tile composition. Should be easy, right? Wrong. This was one of the most difficult ones yet.

Why? Well, the panel prep called for collage, so I had glued on some fairly heavy squares of cloth to represent the dark, grey-blue tiles on the bottom half. I liked the collage level. It was heavily textured. But as I began laying in the encaustic I found the coarseness of the technique (using a bristle brush) along with the coarseness of the collage made the drawing in of fine, thin grouting lines next to impossible(!). It was an ugly mess.

The electrified encaustic pen with three attachments, a pen nib, a brush nib and a small iron.

Also, I discovered that my collage was somewhat inaccurate, so I had to correct some of those grouting lines. What to do? Bring in the troops! I brought out my handy-dandy-super-duper encaustic craft tool, the electrified pen, pictured to the right. I had picked one of these up about 10 years ago. Cost, maybe 25 Euros? I inserted the pen nib attachment, plugged it in and began drawing in my grouting lines. It took some time but in the end that level of detail worked out fairly well.

Along the way there were two other nice surprises. One, while using the big household iron/cheesecloth method to melt the paint partially off on the two large lighter value upper planes, different colours began to emerge in places, along with the india ink underdrawing. Nice. Two, during the “burning-in” phase, the heavily built-up levels of blue-grey paint on the lower tiles began to fuse, creating a dreamy, creamy mottled look. Again, nice nice.

I am happy to put this one aside for awhile, wondering how well it will integrate into the larger piece? Grey balance can be notoriously difficult, but at the same time, that’s precisely where the chromatic vibrations can be so interesting. We’ll just have to wait and see. Technical write up of using encaustic for an indirect painting technique here.