Encaustic painting uses warmed beeswax and pigments to create richly textured images. While this technique is used less today than in the past, many artists truly love to create with encaustic wax. This may be due to the wonderful light aroma of honey that emanates from the melting beeswax or the layers of texture and personality that artists can paint across their wooden canvases.
Preparing the Encaustic
Prepare the encaustic material. Heat a portion of beeswax in an old sauce pan or griddle. While this is heating, crumble Damar powder into the melting beeswax. This powder, which comes from tree sap, helps the encaustic wax to stay on the surface it is painted on as well as to resist melting as easily as normal wax.
Once prepared, the material can be poured into a thick metal container to begin working. You can save small portions of the wax to use later. Encaustic painter Molly Cliff Hilts pouring the extra into small tins that form round portions.
Adding Pigment
Add pigment to the prepared encaustic wax. This is most often done by crumbling raw pigment that you can find at an art supply store into the melted wax. You can also add oil paint to the melted wax instead of raw pigment.
If you happen to add too much pigment to the mixture you can dilute the color by adding more plain encaustic wax to the batch. Consider making very small batches of encaustic wax and experimenting with different color creation methods.
Painting with Encaustic
Once you have warmed and prepared your wax and colored the material, you can begin painting. Most encaustic artists paint on some kind of thick flat wooden board, as this material will not warp under the weight and heat of the wax. Paint the entire board once and then re-melt the wax with blowtorch a powerful blow dryer. This will help to bond the paint to the material you are painting it on. You should lightly remelt each layer that you apply to the painting.
Try experimenting with layering different colors. One of the beautiful things about painting with encaustic wax is that colors, textures and lines that you paint all can layer through each other because wax is by its nature slightly translucent.
You can also scrape away layers of encaustic when the painting has cooled to create effects or show layers that are hidden underneath parts of your painting.
