Canyon Calls 4 Encaustic Painting

I worked all day yesterday on my recent wax painting in my Canyon Calls series, punctuated by interruptions of trying to upgrade the software I use to host an online community for professional hot glass blowers (quite a unique bunch, they are!).

The upgrade, which I had avoided doing for years, went really smoothly (a testament to careful preparation) but I became so engrossed in the process of doing this latest wax painting that I pretty much forgot to take the in-progress photos I was going to do to show customers the process of making an encaustic painting. I did take one at the beginning and one after I started my "underpainting", but after that I forgot and suddenly it was both the end of the day and the end of the painting. Ooops! I'll have to do a more complete documentation of the process on my next one.

In Canyon Calls 3, I explored a little with reflections at the bottom of a canyon with towering walls. In Canyon Calls 4, I shifted to an image across a canyon valley - Monument Valley to be exact. I'm still working on my skills in working in a kind of representational style in hot beeswax (wax often does just what it wants to do and sometimes I'm not completely in charge [smile]), but I've been finding a sort of minimalist landscape style to be where I want to explore right now.

I'm still working towards my goal of 9 of these so I can display them in a grid 3 across and 3 down, so I'll begin #5 today (which is kind of number 4 because the first one I did was accepted into a nationwide exhibit tour throughout 2008 and is not available for me to show this year).

In the below photos, the first one shows my surface before I begin to add color. Encaustic artists have all different approaches to this - some have very thin initial layers and some thick (like mine). I have 10 clear layers fused together on that piece. I like how the thickness - for this series, makes the final painting really juicy looking.

Some artists paint on the sides, but I've not found a good way of doing that yet (putting the wax there is no problem for me - but heating it with a heat gun and not affecting the top layer or have the sides look "even", well, I'm not good at that yet, so I just choose to tape all the sides with painters tape and remove that at the end for clean wooden sides).

In the second photo, I have my initial layers of color. As mentioned in previous posts, I extensively use a razor blade to scrape, scrape, scrape.

And in the third photo, we jump to the end when I have added about 20 more layers with much scraping back to get the affect.