Hi again,

I’m a wee bit late getting this post in but have been up to some new tricks that I wanted to share and get feedback on.  The 1st picture posted above is the one of two small paintings that I created in my 1st encaustic class. This painting (along with it’s partner) have been the most commented upon piece in my studio.  I knew as soon as I made this piece that I was smitten with the magic of beeswax and heat. To create this painting I layered on colors and then placed the wood panel face down onto my heated palette for a moment and lifted it to achieve the effect of motion. I layered beeswax over the swirled wax so it almost appears trapped under the clear layer.

Obviously you are limited by size when using the face down method so when I saw the encaustic iron (picture #2) at the conference at Montserrat I was intrigued.  I decided to play around with it last week as I set out to create a dark, murky background and was really happy with the results although it took a bit of trial and error to not get bare spots (some of my results can be seen in Photo #3).

I know that Linda Cordner uses the iron to achieve a perfectly smooth and glass like finish on her paintings.  Do you have any tips or tricks for using the iron?  Feel free to share any links to work you or another artist has created using something other than the heat gun to transform wax….and thanks for sharing!

See you next week,

Beth