My first official Encaustic piece

Encaustic means “to burn in”: An art form where you use hot wax to paint and/or encase layers.

For years I’ve been wanting to explore more into encaustic. I remember being jealous of my friend Bethany who took an encaustic class, or maybe it was a painting class, but they got to work in encaustic for part of it. I’ve always loved the dreamy quality encaustic pieces have from the layers and opacity of the beeswax. I played around with beeswax on my own before and used it over a few of my collage/mixed media mailart pieces, but I really didn’t know what I was doing and worried that it would just crack off the piece eventually.

Today I finally got the opportunity to officially learn more and experiment with encaustic at a workshop. I had such a good time. The finished piece is basically 2D, but you work in a 3D manner to get the results. You layer flat as well as dimensional items, and play with texture and surface in layer after layer of encaustic medium. It was so exciting and freeing to have to think in entirely different ways than I’m used to working.

Here are pictures of the pieces I created today. The top one was my first piece and the second one was more a last minute piece and I think I might work on it some more. At the workshop someone mentioned the idea of creating a series and displaying them all together, so that was the idea of the second piece. I’d like to make a third or fourth to go with these.

Here are a few good references for working in encaustic:
Book: The Encaustic Workshop by Patricia Baldwin Seggebruch

Video: Getting Started in Encaustic with Kathryn Bevier

Supplies: Apparently if you live in the Northern Illinois area the Blick store in Schaumberg has a variety of supplies, but they also seem to carry a bit online as well.