I actually started this one prior to the one in the previous post (below). This was the first of the tornado paintings painted into a rough and very absorbent watercolor paper mounted on Masonite.
This is also one of those paintings that was rockin’ in a way after my initial painting session, but one tiny area wasn’t quite right, and in changing that area, I ended up changing and repainting pretty much the entire painting several times before arriving at this. In the initial painting, the wax had soaked deeply into the watercolor paper in a fascinating, beautiful, and unexpected way, and so looked far more like a slightly shiny watercolor painting than like my other encaustics.
So I discovered yet another way to work with encaustics. I love it and hope to retain that sense of watercolor-y patchiness in a future painting (that effect did not quite survive the several re-paintings).
The process of painting in encaustic entails heating up the paint – which is a combination of refined beeswax, resin and pigment – until the paint mixture melts, then quickly brushing the strokes of paint onto a surface before the wax hardens — which takes no time at all.* Usually, I can get only 1-3 strokes onto my surface before the wax solidifies. So, it’s dip and stroke, dip and stroke, over and over and over until you’ve covered a portion of the surface, at least.
