Encaustic Basics | How to Start Your First Encaustic Painting

1. Encaustic Basics Introduction: Hi, Welcome to the encaustic basic studio. In this course, we're going to take you step-by-step through creating your own encaustic painting. There are some materials that you need to get started. There are some safety precautions that you need to take. But all in all, this is gonna be a really basic dive into what it takes to make an encaustic painting. Encaustic is a centuries even millenia, old medium, and it is using wax beeswax as a binder for pigment. This course is going to be a really deep dive into what it takes to set up your studio, to prepare a panel, even to do final finishing touches like framing your artwork. So there's lots of different materials that you can use within caustic. It's very versatile. It's beautiful. It creates these wonderful surfaces. It just has a beautiful luminosity and transparency that you can't get from a lot of other mediums. It's one of my favorites that I like to work with and I can't wait to get started showing you how to make your own encaustic painting. 2. Essential Materials: Hi everybody. Welcome to the materials portion of encaustic course. So here in front of me, I have a variety of the basic and caustic materials that you need to get started and painting. And first, we'll talk about what all these materials are. And then we're going to dive into how to use them and when to use them. And we'll really get deep into the basics of all of that. So first and foremost, you need something to paint on with encaustic because the wax isn't flexible when it cools, you need to have a rigid surface. The surface has to be stiff. You can't use like floppy Canvas, even stretched canvas because as the humidity changes and as the canvas is flexible, the wax could crack and then your painting would be ruined. So take it from somebody who's made that mistake. You really want to have a surface like a panel. This is a psycho Mesa night panel that's been attached, glued onto a frame. I've made my own lots of times. It's really pretty simple. But you just want something that's solid. And then we'll talk about how to prep the surface in order to get it ready for your painting. But this is already been Jess owed. The surface has been prepared using encaustic jets, so which is basically like normal acrylic gesso, it's acrylic and marble dust, but it is a little bit more porous, so it has less acrylic and more powder substance, more of the calcium carbonate. That way the encaustic can actually absorb into the surface better. And this is important because the wax, you don't want the wax to chip off. You don't want the surface to just flake off to really get absorbed into the, into the surface of whatever you're painting on. The encaustic Jessica was specially made and formulated for using on panels for encaustic painting. You could make your own. If you had just sell big tubs, You could just add some more calcium carbonate and that would make it simulate the encaustic just so you could paint directly onto a wood surface. You would just need more initial layers because they will soak in quite a lot. So the next thing that we needed that is vital to the encaustic. Once you've prepped your surface is the actual medium itself. And that is made using beeswax and tomorrow resin. And we'll talk about all about how to make that yourself or you can purchase it certainly from places like RNF or in cost to Coase. You can get those suppliers online usually or places like **** Blick. But essentially it's just a mixture of tomorrow resin, which is a hard type of SAP. And that's been melted into the bee's wax. And there's more bees wax and resin and we'll get to that ratio. But that enables, the camera isn't enables the beeswax to melt at a higher temperature. And it also helps harden it so it's not so soft and gives it its smooth, shiny texture when you're done. So it's an important step. If you've just wanted to use bee's wax, the surface wouldn't be the same. And you might run into problems. But nevertheless, we'll talk about that. Your medium is something that's essential, whether you're going to be just coning a photograph with encaustic medium or whether you're actually going to be adding pigment to what your medium and coloring it in for different colors. It's important to start with the basic binder of encaustic paint, which is the median. We have different ways to do that. You can buy these sticks or cakes. The pigment is already in the medium, so it's easy to just melt it into a pan or onto a hot plate. And you can add medium if you wanted to make it more transparent. But color is key. If you wanted to do a painting with color. You can also use oil paint and we'll talk more about the compatible materials within caustic. But oil paint is one of the materials that is compatible and you can actually add that to medium to create color. Having some sort of paint or coloring medium is a good idea for your painting. Next, we need to have something that we're going to heat it because the encaustic melts and then cool, it will warm up to about 200 degrees. If it goes higher than that, then you could risk and burning it. And that's not good. So it's important to have a thermometer. If you have something like a pancake griddle, get a surface thermometer so that you know exactly what the surface is. You can get a meat thermometer and actually stick it in to the paint, to the pigment when it's warm. Obviously, I can touch this cool and it's sitting on my surface. Nice and cool. So it will harden when it's cool, which is what you want it to do on your surface. But in order to actually paint with it, you need to warm it up. So a pancake griddle like this one is a really good option. You can also use an anodized aluminum hot plate that you put something like a burner underneath. Like this. Electric burner is a good all-around kind of heat source for mixing up large batches of or melting large batches and costume mediums. That clear because I use that a lot for coating and we'll use that more than a pigmented paint. I use either enlarge pot that I can melt on a, on a hot plate, or I use a crock-pot. And you can find crock-pot so you can buy them new or you can find them from Goodwill. And they're pretty readily available. And that's nice because you can set them for how high you want to go up though Melfi medium and then keep it all kinda contain that. I liked that for the clear medium because I usually mix up large batches of that. Then the last thing you really need is something to apply the paint to the panel. And in that case, I use brushes. And the brushes that you wanted to use, our natural, not synthetic because synthetic brushes like nylon or polyester will actually melt or burn on the hot plate. So because we're putting the brush on the hot plate and it's 200 degrees. You don't want the bristles to score. These hockey brushes, which are natural fibers, are really good for that. So they can get coated in wax. It's not going to be a problem. And they also come in a wide variety of sizes. You can get a really wide one for putting on your encaustic medium, it clear medium. You can get smaller versions for doing smaller bits of paint. You can even get a really, really tiny brushes. Brushes are really good idea. And we'll talk a little bit more about this. But within caustic because it's, you're getting it warm and then it's cooling. It's not like you could just clean your brush that easily. There are ways and I'll show you how to do that. But if I use a color a lot, like for instance, this greenish color that I use a lot. I'll just leave a dedicate one brush to a color. And I'll just leave that as my green brush for my clear, a medium brush. Whatever I want to use that color, I'll just reach for that brush, eat it up, even heated up in the pan with the paint. And then it just reward terms. And it will go from hard to soft and you'll be able to brush it onto your panel. Again, we'll talk about how to take care of your brushes and clean them and all that good stuff. But these hockey brushes, HA KE, hotkey brushes are really good option for or your encaustic painting. The last thing that you're going to need. One other thing that you will need for your encaustic painting is a torque. And there are different types of torches. You can use this propane torch, which I really like. It will let you change the heat temperature, either a really full blast or really solved. That way, you can fuse the colors, you can move the color on the surface. What it does is that the heat will localize painting and you'll be able to reheat, remelt the wax in a directed way. And that way when you put on the color, you can blend it in, you can fuse it to the layer beneath. And that's really good. Like I said, because you don't want the color to just flake off. We want to bind the colors together on a vinyl. Layers of wax are going to add a lot of layers. So even if you're adding just a little bit or you want to fuse really lightly. Having a torch to fuse is gonna be essential to encaustic painting. You don't have to use the propane. You can use butane if you wanted. Like. It's less easy to manipulate the heat with a butane porch, but some people really like it. You can also use a heat gun, which doesn't have a flame. It's just electric. And you can get some that will dial in the temperature and also the airflow. The heat guns I've found are good from more like spot smaller areas because they'll take a little bit longer to heat up an area. But we'll talk about our tour, our friend, the torch here. And I'm sure you will really come to love it as you explore your encaustic painting. 3. Encaustic Safety: I just wanted to talk for a second about a couple of safety tips. If you're gonna be using your brushes or like a stir stick for instance, and you get them right out of the wax or off the hotplate, they're going to be right. They're not going to probably give you third-degree burns. But the warm wax will cut your finger like a candle dripping on your finger. So it's about like that. The hot plate and the pan or probably a little bit warmer and they might give you a little first-degree burn. But more importantly, what you really don't want to do is leave things plugged in because it's a necessity to have some sort of warming device, whether that's a gas torch or a gas burner or an electric burner or an electric hot plate, you really want to make sure that you leave your space safe. And in this case, I'm unplugging, even though my hot plate is off, I'm unplugging it in addition to turning it off because I just want to be absolutely sure that nothing is going to catch on fire. It's not going to start at electrical fire. It's not going to warm something up, a surface next to it or adjacent or underneath. I don't leave my brushes on a surface because they will stick to it. So when I'm done pulling them off the hotplate, if I'm not going to clean them, that I'll just set them off the surface off a table, for instance, so that the wax part doesn't come in contact with the surface and that you can also put it upright. But that will allow the brush or the tool to cool without sticking to a surface. So again, unplug everything, turn off the gas. Don't put the wax into contact with anything that you don't want it to stick to. And just be aware of your surroundings, aware of what you're doing. Keep surfaces clean and clear of anything that can catch fire. I do have a fire extinguisher in my studio at all times that I can easily access. Because that is the number one thing is safety. So even though I've never had a fire and I've never had anything happen. I am extra safe and extra cautious so that it doesn't happen. So taking those extra safety steps will really ensure that you have good experience and not a scary experience. 4. Substrate Introduction: All right, we are back to talk about prepping our surfaces. So we talked about touched on in materials about the rigid surface that you want to paint encaustic on. So this is an example of just a piece of thin plywood. It gets birch plywood that would work really well. It doesn't have to be super thick, but it does have to be stiff. So a piece this small, thin you could just use on its own, doesn't have to be mounted onto a frame. But you could attach it to a wooden frame, either store-bought frame or just create a frame using like what pieces one by twos or what I commonly use. And then just gluing it and or brand nailing it to the frame. That way. This is store-bought by the way, but that way when you go to frame it or go to hang it, it's already ready to go as easy to attach a wire or some sort of hanging device. And it has a little bit of dimension for that purpose. So to buy a pre just sewed pre-prep panel, they're called cradled panels. Oftentimes, it's kinda expensive. So if you start getting larger in size, It's really a good idea to learn how to make your home because the materials are pretty inexpensive. But if you're going to buy it already made, then it can get pretty pricey. So the reason why they're called cradled panels is because the wood that's been attached to the frame is usually cradled into the frame and you can't see the edge. This one, you can. So it's technically not cradled panel, it's just a panel. But that's why they call them cradled panel. And there's a couple of different ways that I like to prep my surfaces for encaustic paint. This is wood, so it's absorbent, it's porous, so it will accept the wax pretty readily and it will soak in nicely on the first couple of layers and then you'll get a really good attachment. What we want is for the wax to really adhere to the surface. We don't want it to flake off and pop off. Another really good surface that the wax like to attach to as paper. So you could either dip paper in wax or what I usually like to do is take matte medium, which is like acrylic medium. That's basically acrylic paint without a color and use it like a glue. Elmer's glue also works and attach a piece of paper for print or something that I've created. And attach that to the board. You can either wrap it or you can trim it. Once it's attached. You can exacto blade off the edges so that it's nice and even, but having a paper, whether that's a whole sheet or just partially on the board, is also a really good option for prepping your surface initially because the wax will adhere to that. Now one thing about paper is that the wax will darken paper, so it tends to, as it absorbs, it will also darken it a little bit. So if you didn't want the piece of paper that you've never really nice fancy paper and you didn't want it to be changed. And what I would recommend is covering it with like an Elmer's glue and water mixture. That way it's a little bit protected, so it's got a sealant on it. But by adding a little water to the PVA glue, Elmer's glue, you're actually creating a slightly more porous surface for the wax to adhere to. And when you hear people say you can't put wax over acrylic, It's basically because a lot of times acrylic is very plasticky. It comes, ends up with the shear check shiny plastic surface. And when you tried to put in caustic on that, sometimes it'll flake off for peel off. So to avoid that adding a little bit of water or even a little bit of marble dust will help make it more absorbed. So that's one way you'll see a lot of my paintings have collage on the bottom layer, and that's how I do it. Another way is to use, this is already been primed, but you can prime your panel using encaustic Jessup. And we talked about encaustic Desso in our materials section. But Jessica, so it's acrylic, white acrylic paint, but it has more of the calcium carbonate, the marble dust in it, so that it makes it more absorbed, makes it absorbed better. And that's important because like I said, you want a slightly porous surface for the wax to adhere onto and really grip in. I've never had a problem. I do acrylic paintings underneath my caustic IV been adhered like shiny papers. I've never had a problem with the wax coming off, but other people have. So it's a good rule of thumb to kinda do some experiments first and see what the best way is for you. So now we're going to use our encaustic just so two prime one of our camp or panels, sorry, not canvas panels. Since I said that you can actually, another way to do a prep is to stretch a canvas over a panel. Just because you can't use a flexible stretched canvas on a frame, doesn't mean that you can't glue or stretch a canvas onto hard rigid panel. So that's another option too. If you had a painting or if you wanted to start with a really rough canvas texture, you could do that. You just want to adhere it to a panel so it wouldn't be flexible. You're going to private the same way when a Canvas, you're going to take your Justo and we're just gonna do a couple of coats onto our board and we're going to let the coats dry between each layer. And depending on how smooth and how opaque you want the final panel to be, that's how many coats will do. And we might sand in-between if you want a really smooth surface, but the wax will make it smooth anyway as we go. So that's not as important as when you're working on like sand oil painting. 5. Panel Prep: Gesso: Open this guy up. And this is our encaustic. Just like I said, you could use regular Joe. So I found that the encaustic just so actually takes longer to dry. So it's not always a good option if you are in a hurry. I'm going to mix it up because it does tend to settle. Should probably be using a stir stick. But here's what you've got. I'm really trying to mix around and at the bottom so that it gets all that settled. Paint down. I have lots of paper towels around my studio. Or if you use rack into recycling, also lay down a piece of newsprint on my surface so that it would protect it from getting any Gesso on the surface. So some people like to cover their whole edge. You can do that at this point to or you could just paint the front. I'm just going to paint the front end. You'll notice that it might be a little bit thicker than regular gesso, which is probably why it takes longer to dry. But that is because of the added amount of marble does to make it more absorbance. So if you had a few panels that you wanted to do this too, I like to do it sort of assembly line style that way. I get them all out of the way. And when I'm ready to start a painting, there already prepped. I'm just going in one direction. And then when this dries, I will do another layer in the opposite direction. You can lay it on nice and thick. If you didn't. If you wanted to avoid what's happening here with drips, then you can put some tape and we'll do that. Anyway. When we, before we start painting our encaustic medium on, but I'll put some blue painters tape around the edge. And that will ensure that the the sides don't get grips. Encaustic paint drips. But as you can see, it also would prevent BY had done it prior to painting the gesso. It also would have prevented that from happening. Again, it doesn't have to be super smooth. If you're going to do a whole bunch, then you don't have to wash your brush. But if you're going to like, I'm going to do just one and then let it dry. I'll either put my brush in a cup of water so that it doesn't harden. The acrylic will harden pretty quickly or I'll just go ahead and wash it and then wait for my panel to dry. Acrylic dries really quickly with a fan blowing on it. So if you had either a hairdryer or if you had a fan and you wanted to put on there, that makes it dry faster. So if you were in a hurry or just how many patients, then you could do that and speed up the drying process. Like I said, when this is dry, I'll put another codon and then ensure that it's fully dry before we start adding in caustic on the surface because we don't want to trap any moisture underneath. Washington, my brush. 6. Prepping the Edges: So here we have our jets out panel. It has its second codon which hasn't quite dried. And we'll talk about how to tape the edges. Whether you've just sewed it or you want to leave it, bear a bear wood panel or whatever you're using. So I'm going to set this piece aside to dry. And I'm going to use this, which is just the same type of cradle panel. But it hasn't been just so it's just the raw wood. And I'm going to show you how to tape the edges because as the wax, as you can see here, the wax, when it gets put on the painting, it's liquid, so it will drip off. And if you didn't want to have kinda drippy, Marx, or have to scrape that off at the end of your work than taping. Just Painter's tape is a really good option for keeping those edges nice and clean. That way if you didn't frame it, you could just hang it on a wall and the edges would be either painted if you wanted to just show them or they would just be bear. Or you could choose later. Again, I'm just using blue painters tape and to tear off a little piece. And it's easy with a small painting. But if this doesn't really work, if it's awkward for a larger painting, then you can find a surface to prop it up on or something that you can prop it to make it easier for doing this. But basically we're just going to put the tape over the edge. And I'm going to leave a tiny little like eighth inch edge between the tape up to the top of the panel. And that's because as the wax drips, it will kind of curve over that edge. And it gives a nice kind of soft rounded edge. When you pull the tape off, you don't want to chip painting. You don't want a chip that top part off of your painting. So having a little bit of a distance between the tape and the top surface will allow that not to happen. And then you'll see before we remove the tape, if there's a lot of wax that's covering over the tape, will take our loop scraper, which is a really, really, really good tool to invest in for encaustic. Because not only can you clean up your edges, but it scrapes wax off weather hot, or cool really easily. So you can scrape off the surface or you can add texture. This tool is really, really awesome. So once we've got one side, we're just going to do all four sides. And of course this isn't a necessity. But I do it just because I like the way that the finished product looks. And when I frame it, it really helps to keep the frame from bumping up against like a bubble of wax. Because you'll see when we talk about framing, I like to frame these in a float frame, which means that it looks like the painting is floating. And the edges are a little bit separate from the edge of the painting, the panel. And if there's any kind of bumps, it doesn't sit correctly in the frame. So cleaning up the edge and making sure that it's really smooth and nice ahead of time just saves you a lot of trouble. If you're really good at this, you can actually take your tape and just go around the whole thing. But if you haven't done this before, It's a lot easier just to pre tear pieces that down and then I kinda tuck the bottom part. You don't have to get taped that same width. It's not necessary. Almost done. So that's taping your panel. And you can do this before you just Oh, your panel to if you wanted to get that little edge nice and white or you didn't want to see, you know, I didn't want to risk getting any paint on the edges. You could just do this and then just so so that is the final finishing touch to prepping your panel. And now we can go when our paint is nice and warmed up and liquid, we can start to put paint on our panel. 7. Making Encaustic Medium: Hi, I'm Dana Harris Sager. Today we are going to make encaustic media. What encaustic is at its essence is beeswax mixed with DMR resin. And I'm going to show you how to actually make the encaustic medium that is the basis for this type of painting. And then we'll talk about how to add color, how to make the color more transparent or more opaque. So I hope you're ready because we're getting and diamond right now. We are going to be making our bees wax tomorrow resin mixture into encaustic media. And this is purified bee's wax from RNF, which is really great and caustic company, paint company, pigment company. And the purified means that it's been bleached. So you can see that it's white. Normally in caustic or beeswax is like a yellowish tint. So they purify it, strain it, bleach it, and that gives it its whitish appearance. So when it's melted and then spread thinly, it turns clear ish, the more layers down the milky or it gets. And this is an example of what it looks like when it's cooled. If it gets too hot, if you burn it, it'll turn a little bit browner are a little bit yellower. So you want to be careful that you don't do that. And having a good thermometers really helpful tool. But you mix the beeswax with DMR resin in a ratio. And the DMR resin, like we talked about, is basically like a sap from a type of tree. And it's not a pine tree like Rozin, but it's a deciduous tree. You can see it's like these little resonate chunks and we mix it in. I like to do nine part these wax to one part resin. So I've got this little measuring cup. You could use any kind of measuring tool as long as it's your use one per night. Then I've got my hotplate, then I'm going to plug in so I can heat up my large pot. And then you can either keep it in the pot and just remelt it each time you're going to paint. But that takes a long time. So often what I'll do is I'll have these smaller tins that I'll pour the pre-made wax and caustic medium into. Or you could even put it into these ready-made tins. These ones are metal, which is really good for encaustic because when you put them on the hot plate, you don't want them to burn. Like if it was wood or melt, like if it was plastic. Metal is really good. This is actually just a tuna fish can that I cleaned out obviously. And it works just great. If you're into recycling and you don't want to buy it, can, this works perfectly fine. But that's another option. Again, the dog, like the Dollar Store or goodwill will have pans like this. This is a nice thick, durable one. I would avoid the sort of throwaway, temporary ones just because they don't last obviously. So what we're gonna do first is we're going to melt our resin because that's going to take a little bit longer and it's really sticky. So we don't want it to mix with the beeswax yet until it's already melted. So I'm going to measure out one part. Get my pot cooking here, plug it in, turn it on. First of all, turn it on high and starts to melt. And let's see, where are you going to make a huge batch? So maybe take 2 oz, 2 oz of eggs and then I'll measure 9/18 ounces of these wax. I'm going I can already smell the fans start to heat up. They put it on this surface so that as it heats up, it doesn't hurt my table surface tip top. And I like to use a spatula as I'm mixing, as it's melting to liquefy, help it move around and liquefy. And then we'll open up the beeswax once this is melted and pour that in and mix it all together. And then we'll either let it cool or put it into our tints. You can see that it's starting to get kinda sticky as it's melting on there. These bigger chunks might take a lot longer. It's going to melt it down. So it's nice and sappy. And then that way. So I'm going to measure to smell of bees wax. If you don't already love it, you become engrossed in encaustic. You will love it. Rest assured. Bigger chunks can be kinda broken up by 1010 parts suburbia and doesn't take super long. Now one thing with encaustic is that it's not toxic, but it could be an irritant. So what I like to do is have a fan going or B by an open window, because especially the bee's wax can have an irritating effect on your eyes and your lungs, especially the fumes as it's melting. Right now, even though it's in a powder form, it's not going to affect you too much. It's not like pigment and dust that you have to be careful of because pigments have different chemicals and different metals even. But the bee's wax is really inert. But when it gets warm and warmed over the cooking pot, then it can be an irritant. So what you wanna do is either be by an open window or have a fan blowing. I turn the fan on after I'm filming because I don't want to hear the fan blowing, but I have a nice large studio space and it's very well ventilated. So that's one thing to be aware of with this. Media. It down just a little bit. It's nice that melty. So when the resin gets all nice and liquidy, that's when we can add the beeswax. And again, we don't want to scorch the bee's wax, so we want to make sure that we're going to cook the beeswax when it's time at a temperature that's or about 200 degrees. You can see that the demarc has a little bit of can have a little bit of impurities in it because it's a SAP. So if you don't want that to end up in your paint after you cook it. Well, it's still hot. You can strain it before you put it into your containers because drain it through. Obviously a dedicated strainer, like a metal mesh strainer, and that way it will capture all those kinda impurities. Hello, Almost there, down below now. And then we can add our liquidity and it's sticking a lot less, right? Liquified. It's not quite so sticky. I can start to pour in. Maybe, you know, let it kinda mix together as the wax melts. This wax is really nice because it's already in these little, like, I don't know, peas, grains, I guess you'd call it. Sometimes they come in these little past deals that are slightly larger. If you get it in a chunk, sometimes will come like a big hunk like this that's hard to melt, it just takes longer. So if you're, if you wanna go the less expensive route, oftentimes that's a good way to do it. But if you, if you want to save time and money, go with the past. So this is not a necessity making your own medium. It, it's nice because you can control sometimes people want more resin or more wax and you can control that ratio. Whereas if you've just by the medium itself, it also tends to be more expensive if you buy it as a medium. So now that our wax is on belted, we can strain it through just this strainer metal strainer mesh. You can label it or you could pour it. I preferred a ladle because of this BIG is kinda awkward. So I'm going to leave it on low just because I don't want it to harden yet, but I don't want it to be too long. And I'm going to do this over my hot plate, even though my hot plate is not gonna be on. But basically what you do is you want to be careful because this is still 200 degrees, so you don't want it to touch you, but you can label it. The strainer should catch all of the nasty bits. And then also remember that wax cools pretty quickly. We'll learn about that in the rest of our lesson, but you can't keep it in the ladle too long before it starts to cool, to warm to hot plate. And you can see that the, you know, wax melting strainer is probably too big, but the only one that I had right now because I want to make sure that it's landing in the little pan. And the reason I put them in the littler, the smaller hands is because it's easier to remelt. Then. When I go to use the medium, rather than trying to melt down this huge pot. Just let that cool. This. I might need to clean either a torch or if it's still warm, you can take a bunched up paper towel and wipe the wax off. That's how I clean my plate to. But you can see that it's got a whole space now, but everything else is kinda solidified, but that's okay because it's just a thin layer and you could probably either cools, It'll be flexible and this will just pop off. Or when I do it again and it'll remelt it right away. So I don't really have to worry about that. But these are just going to cool down. And I'm going to turn my hotplate middle burner off. And then we'll be ready to move into talking about adding color and getting the wax down on the boards and prepping are born so exciting stuff. 8. Setting up Your Palette: Hi everybody. Welcome back to encaustic basic studio. So today we're going to talk about setting up your encaustic palette, setting up your space, and just getting started with putting your first layer of encaustic medium on your panel. So here I have our palette. This is our hot plate. I'm calling this our palette because we've got all our colors on here. We've got our medium that we made, mixed up ourselves. We've got a large pot of white because we use that a lot. I use that a lot. And then several other colors here. And then I've also got a, an anodized aluminum palette. This is a hot plate with a brush rack, and this is really handy for keeping your brushes upright because we'll talk about how you want to warm them. In addition to the encaustic medium and paint, then I've got a hot plate under here. It's not on obviously. But this is going to heat up the anodized aluminum surface. The nice thing about the aluminum versus the pancake griddle is that you can see that the wax on the griddle starts to beat up. That's because the surface has been coated with Teflon for making pancakes. Non-stick surface, and it doesn't hurt the wax or anything like that. It just makes it beat up. So it's harder to kind of get a big pool of color. So the difference is that the anodized aluminum doesn't have that texture. It warms up evenly. So you can mix colors on here just like you would a palette. You can even transfer paint to paper and a monotype method, but that's a whole other class. But the nice thing about this is that it's made specifically for mixing encaustic paint and medium. And you'll see the difference when we lay down some color on the aluminum versus the pancake griddle. And I'm only touching this because it's cool and I haven't turned it on yet. But once it starts to cool or it starts to heat up, remember, it'll heat up to about 200 degrees. We've got a little thermometer to determine how hot the surface, this surface is. This one has a temperature gauge, but it's always a good idea to have a surface temperature to surface thermometer to measure that temperature. So I'm going to plug these in, plug this guy in, plug this guy in. They're still not on until I turn them on to see there's my measure. I'm going to turn it up to 200-250 just so that it heats up quicker and then we can dial it in and turn it back down when it's time to actually transfer the paint to the surface. Same with this guy. It's on but until I turn it, this one's on high right now. And again, I'm going to leave that there right in the middle so that it starts to heat up the surface evenly. And then I'll use my surface thermometer to measure that temperature. I've also got a board here, and you can see that the wax has dripped onto the board. So whenever I'm working on a surface, I like to be able to clean it up easier. And if I'm working directly on my large table here, it's hard to scrape the wax on. Wax likes to stick. If it sticks to your surface and your surface, you want to use that surface for other things, then it's hard to get that wax off in order to put something else onto it. I just use a dedicated surface. Most of the tools that you use for acrostic are dedicated to encaustic. So let's talk a little bit about brushes. This is my large hockey brush for my encaustic medium. And that is so that I can put a lot down. Because when you're going to be putting the first few layers of medium on, in order to get a nice smooth working surface, you want to lay down a couple of layers and this just really helps it to go quicker. I'm going to put that I can either put it directly into my wax pot or I can put it on the hot plate like this. And I like this mostly because it has this brush rack, but you can use pretty much anything as a brush rack. Anything that will prop up your brushes so they don't, the handles don't fall onto the palette and get warm. So you really just want the brushes to get warm because you can see that when they're cool, they're hard. The wax will embed in there. So we want to warm that up. Then all the colors that I'm going to use, you can clean your brushes. We'll talk about that after we paint to a certain extent, but the wax will really stay in those brushes even if you clean them and wipe off the majority of the wax. So I like to dedicate all my brush colors, two particular colors. So for instance, this is the orangeish brush. Then I've got rid of a bluish brush that'll go over here. I've got a greenish yellow brush. You don't have to to do each particular color but a range. So if I was gonna do like a slightly darker, reddish, I could use this brush tool. And of course we've got our white. See, That's our white. Not totally white. So I'm going to choose a different one. There we go. Alright. Some people, instead of using these low tins, they like to use like 12 ounce little TIM tins or canned corn type of tins. That way they're brush can just sit in there. That's nice, except I find it hard to actually see the color, but they work just fine. So if you wanted something tall so that your brushes could actually have something to lean on in the can itself and you can do that too. I'm just going to take a little while, but you can see that this is already starting to melt. So want to make sure that that gets up to temperature. And then we will, once these are all nice and warm and melty, then we will measure the temperature, make sure that we're not scorching are often caustic. And then we will move on to coding our panel. 9. Adding Color to Medium: So when you're setting up your palate, There's a couple of different ways to add color to your media. You can purchase the pigment in a little cake form or in a stick form. This is in Costco's brands is RNF, which is a really great company that makes the wax. And you can cut off a chunk with a knife or ink knife and put that in a tin of either a little bit of encaustic medium or you can just melt it down into its own TIM, like often if I really liked this color, I'll just take the steak, unwrap it, plop it into a tin, melts, and then I have a nice little tin that I can put my brush in and work on. And the nice thing about the sticks is that you can put them on the hot plate and mixed small amounts. But really if you wanted to make a whole painting that used a lot of one color or 100 to get a wider brush. Having a small amount of pigment, having to melt it each time on the hot plate is really not economical. So you can buy these little pure pigment sticks and then put them in there. If you wanted them to be more transparent, then you can add some more, add more encaustic medium than pigment. And some of them do come transparent or semi-transparent. I'll tell you on the label whether it's more transparent or more opaque. Another way that you can actually make pigment, pigments, encaustic paint is to add powdered pigment. So powdered pigment is compatible with encaustic medium. You can, this is from Zach key, which is Italian store in Florence, Italy. But Gamblin as a paint company and they also make dry pigments. And you can experiment with how much pigment to add to get the color that you want. Because if you're adding two already transparent medium, then you want to make sure that if you want it to be more opaque, that you add more pigment. So this is another option for making your own and cost to paint. The last thing that you can add to encaustic medium is actually oil paint. Oil paint is, uses linseed oil as a binder. So there's gonna be some oil in here. So if you mix oil paint into a tin of encaustic medium, then what's going to happen is it will tend to separate when you reheat it. It will all join together and being homogenous again. And if you brush, if you use your brush and stir it up, then it will blend together, congeal. But if, if, when it cools, it will separate, the color won't really look like it is when it's cooled than it is when it's heated. Oil paint is certainly an option for coloring your your encaustic paint. And just like with the dry pigment, you can add small amount first, test it out and see if that's the transparency and the color that you like. And then keep adding for more opacity. Because usually the tubes, the sticks tend to be the most pure pigment. They tried to make it so that there's more pigment and binder in those like a concentrate. So that's another way that you can create your own colors or how he would get a color from a stick per se into a little tin. Then you can apply it to your paintings. 10. Applying Medium to a Raw Panel: What I'm going to show you is how to put on the first layer of the encaustic medium. This is the medium right here. It's the beeswax with the DMR resin, the one part DMR to nine parts wax. And that's gonna go on. I'll show you first what it looks like when it goes on the bare wood and then what it looks like on our Jess owed panel. And that way you can get a sense of what happens when the encaustic medium goes on because it's, it's clear, but you can see that it's a little bit tinted because the wax has that sort of whitish matte look. It will make what's underneath a little bit more opaque so it's not going to be completely clear like resin would be. Then we'll talk a little bit about setting up your colors and we'll move on to actually adding pigment and things. But I like to start with a fresh surface, if you will, and then add my first layer of encaustic medium. Now, you don't have to do that. And once you kinda learn and understand how the wax interacts with the surface, you can actually go from pigment and paint directly onto the surface first and then do a layer of encaustic medium. But just be aware that between each layer you're going to be fusing, fusing using your torch. And that means that you're gonna be heating up the surface. So if there's bare wood, if you try to fuse pigment that doesn't have the whole surface coated with wax, you're going to essentially burn part of your painting. So it's a good idea to either start with some encaustic medium as a layer initially or paint and then layer on. And because the encaustic paint isn't wet or dry, we actually will talk about it in terms of warm or cold or melted and cooled. Then there's different things that you have to think about. For instance, the temperature in the room, and how that's going to affect the different layers. And it's kind of the process that you're going to take. Some of the things that you need to think about when you're starting your painting and whether you put pigment down first or you put in caustic medium down is how long does it take for the wax to cool if it's a really hot day than it might take longer for that initial layer to cool. And if you put warm wax on top of warm wax, then it's going to blend. You're gonna get different effects, whether intentional or unintentional. So it's important to understand the way that the wax works and how it reacts to the temperature outside in your studio. My studio right now is about, I'd say 70 degrees, so it's a pretty good temperature. The wax is going to stay warm when I go from paint to panel. But it would probably cool at a good rate on the panel. And that way between the layers after fusing, it's not going to take a really long time to cool down. If it does, then there's things you can do, like put a fan on it to help it cool down. But if you were to put, like say, a clear wax coating on top of white or any other color that hasn't cooled all the way, you're gonna get smearing. So these are things that I've learned through experience, but also things that you can try. And if you understand that, then you can either use that to your advantage if you wanted that sort of blending and streaking. Or you can avoid that by doing things like letting it cool all the way down first. So let's put some wax on our panel. Here. You can see that my hotplate is nice and warm. I've got the brush that's been resting on it is nice and melt. The wax is staying where it's supposed to talk about putting color on later. These are nice and liquidity. They said drippy brushes are nice and warm and flexible. Same with this one. And I've got a little temperature thermometer here. This is a meat thermometer, so it's designed to get stuck into meat, which makes it really good for measuring the temperature of our wax because we can just stick it in there. Sometimes the surface doesn't. Always. If you get up temperature thermometer that you can stick on the surface, it doesn't always give you the accurate temperature that your wax it. So I'll just stick it into one of these wax pans and watch the temperature go up. So it's at 168. Going up, up, up. It seems to be hanging out at around 204, which is just about right. So that's perfect. I can clean up to about 200 degrees is perfect. That's what we want our wax to be. So I'm going to take my large hockey brush. And this might seem obvious. These are still a little bit not melted, but the rest of it is, but cool or the, sorry, the coolest part of the wax is at the surface and the warmest is down by the hot plate. Notice I'm not touching it now because there's melted wax on here, two degrees. So if you get your brush down at the bottom of the pan, then it's going to be warmer and it will stay warmer longer. You'll notice how fast the wax cools when we go to take it from the pan to the panel. Again, this is sort of also dependent on the temperature where you are. But understanding this and what kind of textures you want to achieve, whether a smoother texture or more bumpy texture, depending on how much the brushes cooled. I'm not going to just hang out and think about things and plan things while the brushes out of the wax because it's kinda cool, It's cooling right now. And if I were to go and put this halfway cooled onto my panel, I'm not gonna get a lot of wax on the surface. So I want to keep it in the wax pan as long as I can until I'm ready to go and apply it to my panel. So I put it on. And you can see that there's more obviously more wax, the initial placement, and then it sort of fades back that way and it cooled rather quickly. As soon as I started putting it down, it was cooling. It's also absorbing into the bare wood. So you can see all these little bubbles. The little pockmarks are caused by the wax absorbing into that wood panel. I don't want to let it drip too much, just enough that it's not gonna be dripping too much on my palette or on my plate here. I'm kinda overlapping a little bit because I just want to make sure that everything is getting coded and we will go the opposite direction before we fuse. This is why having a really big brush is a good idea because it covers more ground, but it also lets you work a little faster. Now it's pretty cool to the touch already. And I can pick it up and you can see how the wax drips around the edge. That would all be on your panel if you didn't have the tape. But that's good because that means that the wax is getting all the way to the edge. And now what I'm gonna do is turn it so that my panel is horizontal. And then I'm gonna do one more layer just to ensure that the whole thing is covered before a fuse it. By holding your brush horizontally, you're keeping the wax in the bristles. If I were to hold it like this, then more of it drips out. Whereas if I hold it like this, then it's all sitting on the surface. Which means that when I go to put it down on my panel, it's going to hold a lot more and I can kinda tilt my brush and it will drip out onto my panel. So more layers of encaustic medium initially will give you a smoother surface. Because the more you can build up your layers, then the more when you fuse it, the more even it will be and it will kind of all sort of self level. So now what I'm gonna do is it's going to take my torch. I'm going to make sure there's not little scraps of paper nearby that could ignite. Going to move everything non-essential out of the way. It's another reason why I work on a board like this. This is just like a masonite board that's got some texture on it. When I'm using my torch, I'm going to be holding the cylinder and then holding the cylinder with my left hand because I'm right-handed. And holding the trigger with my right hand. Left hand holds the cylinder with propane and right hand holds the trigger. There are lots of different propane torches. And if you're using like a butane torch, you'd probably just hold it fit small enough with one hand and same with the heat gun. So for these initial layers, warmer or hotter is better. So I'm going to make my flame pretty hot. That way it fuses it quickly and it fuses it really well. The way that the propane torches work is no matter if you have a trigger switch or you have a striker to ignite it, you turn on the gas. I turn it until I can hear that sound. If you can't hear that sound or it's really quiet, not enough gas is coming out to light it. And then for this one, I'm just going to pump the trigger ones. Then either I can turn it down for a really, really light flame, or I could turn it up really hot flame. You could see how it's re-melting the encaustic. It's pulling a little bit unevenly, but that's okay because we're going to put one more set of layers on the painting and then it will get way more EBIT. So this is a pretty thin layer, especially over here. You can see that it's really, really thin. And if I were to scrape any of that back, it would be pretty easy to just scrape it back to the wood. So what we're trying to do is build up a nice smooth layer so that we can add paint and other things and even scrape away. And it's not going to go right back down to our panel. This is the first two initial layers. You can see that there's still some pockmarks because it has absorbed into the surface and that's okay. Those will disappear when we add some more. If you spent too much time trying to get rid of those with the flame, then sometimes it can actually do more harm than good. You'll end up either burning your wax or you will make it so warm that it won't cool enough. And when you go to add more wax, it will just make a little hole. So it's better if that's happening, you know, wax isn't sticking in certain parts. Better to just let it totally cool before you come back and start adding more wax. Because the more you try to fix it, sometimes the worst off it gets. So if I touch this, it's pretty warm. I wonder if our surface thermometer will tell us what the surface is. Going up. 78 degrees, 80 degrees. You need to not super hot 90 degrees. Obviously you could touch it. But if I were to put another layer of, say, color, right now, that layer would be really smooth because this is warm and the wax and I'm applying as warm and we'll talk about that too, and different textures that you can get. But just know that if you wanted, that the surface of the wax plays a role in how it gets applied. So going to turn it because it looks like this is the thin part. This part is the part that I didn't start at last time. So that's where I'm going to start this time. It take my brush and do exactly the same thing I did before. Worry about those little drips. Now kinda smooth write in this way. I can turn it like this. So notice that it's going on a little smoother now. It's not quite as bubbly and it's not quite as brushy that got a little bit brushing because this is warm and this is warm. It's also got a layer of wax, so that also helps to get the WACC the subsequent layers on a little bit smoother. I don't have to wait for this to fully cool before I fuse because fusing is just reheating it again. I can just go right into fusing. And again, we turn it on so we can hear the gas. It's enough. When I go a little bit farther, pull the trigger. And I'm really just lingering a little bit all the way off, all the way tightened before you put it down. Sometimes if the older with an older torch head, the flame will still be going even after you turn it off. That's okay. Just stand it up and let it cool down. Let it stop. It looks like it's drooping a little bit. It looks like my table's going a little bit of an angle. So what might be a good idea to have something, prop it up? Otherwise I'll get uneven texture as it cools. I might have to refuse that. So having us a level surface is really important to get a really smooth surface. You can also see that there's still, you can still see some of the texture of the wood. But as it cools, it gets a little bit milky. That's because the wax has that characteristic milky, translucent texture. And you'll see things through it. The deeper the layers go, the more wax we put on or the more encaustic meeting we put on, then the more opaque it will get. Meaning that if you put something underneath it and layer this over the first one or two coats with encaustic medium. You'll be able to see it. It'll be a little bit sort of hazy. But the more layers we put on even of the medium, the more opaque it's going to get, which is cool if you want to have that deep space and the illusion of depth. You're trying to see things clearer than either less coats of encaustic medium, do it right at the end, or try a different embedding technique, perhaps resin. So that is our encaustic medium over our plant clean panel. Now we'll do a white one and see how that looks. 11. Applying Medium to a Gessoed Panel: We've got our white panel or just sewed panel. And we're going to see the difference between what that looks like with the encaustic medium initially and our plain wood panel. I'm going to do the same thing that we did with our wood panel. We're going to go the same direction. And I just wanted to show you a slightly different angle here too. You can see how the wax goes on and how my brush tilts. If you're working large and you can't make it all the way to the edge. Then just doing as much as you can in the time that the brush and the wax allows. Working in smaller sections, basically like coordinating off foot by foot section and just working on that, getting that wax down. I would advise coating the whole thing prior to fusing though. So if you were working large, you wouldn't want to coat just one area and then fuse that same area. You would want to coat the whole thing in sections and then fuse the whole thing at once. That would ensure that nothing different areas didn't get burned or didn't get left out. Notice that my brush is starting off the panel and going all the way to off the other edge. I'm not trying to start right on the panel that so that I want the whole thing to get coded. And you'll see those telltale drips. One doesn't have it. But you'll see some of the drips that happened from that. And that's that's okay. That's what we want. We don't want to skip little areas, we want the whole panel to be covered. So then we're going to use our torch again and we're going to light it. Makes sure it's nice and high. We turn it all the way off. And notice when I'm using the torch that I am slowly kind of hovering. I'm not I'm not staying in a certain area and leaving it there. I'm constantly moving it. And I'm going in a systematic way. I'm starting at the top and I'm moving it down. And the torch will localize certain areas, but it also has this cone of heat that extends out. And so it will cover about 3 " of area. And you can just like we did with the wax, you can kinda overlap that heat as you go down so that it all kinda pools evenly. And already we can see that it's a little bit milky or a little bit whiter than it was in the previous painting. Now let's see a slightly different angle. Turn it this way. We do that before. Alright. Well, our horizontal way now, I'm kinda overlapping that. Then we fuse, know. And then we turn. Won't do that. Confused. So one thing that you can see that I can see right off the bat is that my, there's less bubbles. My surface is smoother initially even with the initial layers and fusing. It's much smoother than the panel with just the plain wood. And that's because the gesso has primed the surface. So you can see the difference when the gesso is on just in the absorption. Because the gesso has prime the surface there's already less absorption, the more the gas bubbles out of the porous surface of the wood, the bear would more, it creates those bubbles. So if you prime it, you're going to get less of that. But also the more wax you put on, the less that happens too. So our first surface will compare side-by-side. So here is a side-by-side comparison. Side-by-side comparison of what our pieces look like. This is still pretty warm, smeared it just a little bit, and this one has cooled, so it's a little bit smoother. You can still see the wood grain, which is nice. It's cool to a sort of a milky, clear ish texture color. And this one has that white obviously, but it's a little bit yellowy. It's not quite a white, white even with the purified wax. So that's just something to be aware of as you're starting your paintings, thinking about what kind of imagery you want to use and how you want the wood to either play a part, the panel that you're working on, or if you start with something like a collage, how that's going to affect and get layered over the wax has been I think that those different layers. 12. Transparent vs. Opaque Paint: So here I have the palate, the hot plate. And we saw that our, our, There's a little bit of clear medium on there already. Let's leave this here. And I want to talk a little bit about the difference between the opaque paints and the transparent paints and how to get to achieve both. Then also how you can actually make the encaustic paint. So for instance, this is the medium, and that's what you always start with. Everything that that is encaustic paint has the medium in it, whether that's a stick form, a little cake form, or this is even a blending stick. This is medium just in a static form, so it's the same thing. And when I put it on the hot plate, it melts down. The nice thing about the anodized aluminum is that it's going to just stay pooled and puddle where I put it. Versus Let's just use a color. If I put this down, this pinkish color, I just have to rub it on the hot plate and it melts melts into a nice little puddle. If I put it over here, it does the same thing, but you can see how it beads up. So the difference between the Teflon coating and the anodized aluminum coating is huge. So there's a little bit of that. Now. The pigment forms, the stick form, and those store-bought cakes, those are as broad as opaque often as you can get and they'll tell you whether they are. So is this a semi-transparent, tiny little letters semi-transparent on the sticks. They have these hot sticks, so they have labels too. I just took this label off and it will tell you this one says transparent. So it says transparent on there. If you wanted something that was opaque, meaning that it covered over what's the layer underneath, then you would want to look for something that said opaque or not transparent, not transparent or semi-transparent. Those are going to be allow the colors and the layers underneath to show through more. And that means that they're mixed with some more of the encaustic media. If you had an opaque color, say this one and we put it down. If we put it on our, say we took a paint brush, this is our blue brush. Put it on there, and we painted it on our surface. Let's use our white surface. So we put this on there. It's totally opaque. So wherever the paint goes, it's covering over everything underneath. Now, if I wanted that to be a little bit more transparent, but I only had this opaque paint. What I can do is I can take a little bit of my medium either in the stick form and put it down on top next to it. Or often what I'll do is I'll take some of my already mixed up liquid and just drip it on drip it on the surface. You just got to be careful with this method that whatever you're going over, if you didn't want this to be dripped into and just be careful how you're trans, porting it. So now I can take and mix in a little bit of my medium. And you can see already on the palette it looks different. So it has more medium which makes it more transparent. So that's the difference. In transparency and opacity. You can see that I have to keep my brush warm, or I'll see these brushstrokes. Right? If I'm working on a cooler surface, then you'll see the brush strokes even more because the, the paintbrush will cool. The wax on the paintbrush will cool faster. So this is the difference between opaque and transparent. But you can make it take something that's more opaque and make it transparent. You can also mix colors on your palette. So say I wanted it to be a little bit browner, purpley brown. I could mix these colors just like oil paint. And having this nice anodized aluminum palette really helps you do that. I could do. You could see that this doesn't go very far. So if I wanted more, but I wanted a heavier application, I would have to definitely mix up some more paint. But just by adding one extra color, I'm getting a totally different look, totally different color. So this is like a dress similar to a dry brush technique where you've got not a lot of paint on your brush and it's cooling on the surface. So you have a lot of those brush textures. If I wanted it to be more smooth, I would hit my brush up and I would use more pigment. Then that would give me a smoother mark. And heating up your surface with a torch. Just lightly fusing also really helps to get a smoother brushstroke. Now, if I left this, this is what the texture would be. A lot of people like this type of texture. But if we wanted to move on and keep layering and we didn't want that, all that texture, we would fuse it. So fusing can be very hard for using very heavy fusing, very hot fusing like we did to make this super smooth. Or we can make it very light fusing and try to retain as much texture as we can, but still fuse it to the layer underneath. And that's what we're gonna do. And I'll show you what happens when you fuse the color at a high temperature. You could actually move it around because it all liquefies. And then you can kind of guide that the liquid wax where you want it to go. 13. Fusing with a Torch: So first let's see what a light fuse will do. And then we'll talk about what happens when you do a heavy kinda fuse on this color. I'm still going to open up the propane pretty high and strike it. But then I'm going to turn it down so that it's just barely kind of like very light flame. Then I'm going to sort of do this like wispy motion. I'm not holding it like I did before. I'm just going where I painted. And that just long enough for it to remount and you can see it change. The more you do this, the more you'll kinda get accustomed to the way that you can tell when it's fusing. And all those little bubbles have sort of popped out. So that's a light views and it essentially looks the same. I still have all those textures, that same kind of brush stroke. It's not a physical texture as much. I don't see the the very rough brushstrokes, but I can still visually see it. And again, if that was my final layer and I didn't really liked that, I could leave it. It's just not fused to the surface. Now let's do one more and see what it looks like when we force the force it to move. So for that, I'm going to use slightly different color. Let's try this. Put that in here. You can see that the color was sitting and so it's because I mix it up, it's kinda combining. Now, as this brush is heating up, I'll talk a little bit more about your palette. If I wanted to clean this palette up, what I would do is ball up a paper towel like this with my hands, don't touch it. And I could just sweep it across the surface and it absorbs the wax. That's as easy as it gets. The surface has to be warm. Can't do this one, it's cool or it'll form that solid surface. But you could do that with all of the hot surfaces. Colors look like on here. That's kinda nice. It's like a greenish amber. If I know I'm going to use a lot of a color, then what I'll do is mix up a little tin and these colors that I've got in the pans, the tins, I use quite a bit. Say I wanted, I knew I wanted this umber color and I wanted it a little bit more transparent than I would probably cut a chunk of this off. And then put it in a tin with maybe like 50% encaustic medium. Then you can test it out and have like a testing palette to see what it looks like on an actual panel. Because oftentimes, if you want a specific color, it's hard to tell what it's gonna look like on the palette when you get it on and fuse it onto the panel here. So that's a pretty color. So that's just a good, good tip. I really like these colors. With encaustic. I tend to work pretty limited in terms of the colors that I'm using encaustic paint. Just because, again, if you're mixing up an amount, it's not like you can just take this brush and go dump it into the orange or melt down a whole tin of another color. There's limited space. So maximizing what you've got by using a limited palette is really helpful. And by that I mean, if you use limited colors, you can mix them together and create a cohesive palette of a wide range of colors. Let's use this one. Get this guy out of the way. If you didn't want to drip or risk dripping your color over your your colored or sorry if you didn't want to risk dripping your colored paint. Over your encaustic medium. Often what I'll do is get a little clothes pin or a metal like binder clip, pinch it onto the tin, and then take the whole tin off of the palette over my painting. And that helps to keep it from cooling because if you set it down on a wet surface, the tin is going to cool. But it also helps you not have to grab the whole ten to bring it over. Just a tip. Alright, so let's do line of color here. Again, this is to show you what it looks like when when we confuse a high fusing with the pigment. So actually let's use one more. I'm gonna do one more layer white. This is kind of an open, transparent white. So I'm going to fuse, turn it on. I'm going to use pretty hot. So as I've used, you can see that the colors starting to loosen up. And you can actually to certain extent guide where it's going to go. On the surface. The closer you are to it, the more directed the heat's going to be. So the more or the less control you will have, I guess. But I'm heating a little bit of that surface up there so that it kinda drips into it. As long as it's still liquid, you can tilt it and make it move in different directions. But that is one way to fuse and get the color around by actually liquefying all the layers and blending them and moving them together. So less control, more control, more brushstroke, more soft background texture. Then when this is cool, we will put another layer of our encaustic medium over it. And that way, for instance, this will get sealed in and we'll just keep building our layers. We don't have to, we could leave it just like this. We could continue to build with different materials. But this is think of the encaustic has a lot of layers. You can always scraped back, you can always add more. You don't have to be satisfied just with one layer. You can keep going. So don't be afraid as you're, especially as you're beginning to really try and experiment and do different textures and see what happens. Well, what if I layered this color over this, or what if I put a layer over the whole thing and moved it around and saw things come, come up and out. This is pretty cool. What I'm gonna do is show you how. Now that this is cool. What it looks like when another layer of medium goes on top. If this hadn't been cooled, when I stroked it across, it would smear. This is still pretty warm. We'll see what that looks like. Well, I didn't do too bad. But often what I'll have happened, especially if it's sort of a deep color like that. If you sweep across with your medium, it will actually pick up some of that pigment if it's not cooled and smear it across the surface. Again, that might be something that you like and you want to exploit. Otherwise, just know that that's what happens. One more fuse even out the surface. Because even though we've got a lot of, we've got a lot of different textures happening and we've got a lot of different types of marks. If you can end with a very smooth surface, I think some people really like that. And the way that you do that is by layering over one more caustic medium layer and then fusing that to a very smooth surface. 14. Painting and Scraping: So if I pits this is the warm just recently fused and I add some paint, it goes on, really push that off. It goes on really smoothly because it's already got a warmed surface. So that's one thing to think about. See. If you didn't want that they wanted the more textural look you would want to wait until this was cool, which is one reason why I have multiple pieces going at the same time. Transparency. It's just one of the most beautiful parts about caustic. Say I didn't like the way that, that covered over it. I could take my loop tool, which is mostly, it's made for ceramics, but you can certainly use it for anything like wax. If it's warm, I just barely have to to scrape away. And the wax, the top layer comes off. If I scraped too hard and it's super warm, then more will come off and I'll go straight through to the bottom. But it gets a really nice texture that you can't get just by applying. So often, having this sort of back-and-forth put on takeoff sort of approach can be very interesting. If you're into sort of texture. I'm layering. I can keep working or I could lightly fuse and add on top. I think what I wanna do for this one is actually going to heat this up as brush and do some smaller mark-making. This brush is nice and warm. Let's see. I'm going to add a little bit of the medium to make it more transparent. And out a little bit of my blue drip, some of that in there. I like the greenish, but I liked the greenish blue. Yeah. Not totally in love with this part. But that's why I have my scraper. I can either cover over with another layer of paint or I could scrape some parts back. Scrape some way, can actually shape it. You know, like I'm drawing. It's better. So if I take too much away and I want some more white there, I can add some more, either lightly or it could cover over it if I wanted to. I think I like I like how that sort of transparent to, which will get even more transparent if we fuse that. Alright, let's views lightly. Because I love all that. Texture. Don't love that one. 15. Cleaning Up: Well, when you are done with your setup and it's time to clean up. The first thing that you wanna do is clean off your palette. And I've done that by balling up some a paper towel and wiping off all the excess wax while the palate is still warm. If you try to do this one, It's cool, It's not going to work. So you can do that on here if you want to. If you have a place to put these tins while they cool, That's not going to melt or have them stick to the surface, then you can certainly remove them using the little like a binder clip or a clothes pin. If they're small enough. If they're larger than a spring clip would work too. Move them off the pallet and then clean it. Somewhere like another palette or some surface would surface that's surface that you're dedicated just to that would be a really good idea. And then after that, if your brushes need further cleaning, if they're still warm, then you can either wipe them off with the same paper towel. And that gets a lot of the paint off. Like I said, the way that the wax works and embeds into the brushes, they're not going to get 100% clean no matter what you do. But if you can keep them warm and keep wiping off onto paper towel providing you're not overheating your hands and getting that, burning yourself. And then you can use this brush cleaner, which is just the soy wax, to also clean your palette too, if you want, if there's any kind of residual tint, what I do is take a little bit of the soy wax, sprinkle it on the warm pallet and you'll see that it'll start to melt. And then as it's melting, paper towel, get your brush in the wax. The soy wax is different than encaustic medium. It's not beeswax. And then he just further wipe it off. And you can continue to do this. Especially if you dedicate, say, a white brush and you accidentally get color on it, this is a good way to clean that and save your white brush. But it's not gonna get 100% like you're not gonna be able to use this for oil paint again. But then once that's cleaned, you can see how there's still a lot of pigment on the palate. The soy wax will help pick up and clean the brushes and the surface is not going to hurt if there's sort of a layer of soy wax, it's not going to hurt your brushes, not going to hurt palette. It's not going to make it compatible with your encaustic paintings. So that's how you clean up. You let everything cool. I try not to turn everything off and then leave. I tried to make sure that after everything is unplugged and cooling that stick around so that if anything because it is still warm and if anything does happen, I want to make sure that I'm present. So one final step after everything is turned off again is to unplug all of the plugs, the hot plates, the pancake griddle, turn that off and let everything cool down. I put my brushes kinda hanging off the table just so that the wax bit doesn't stick to my surface. This one, I never heat it up, so it never got really warm. That's basically the end of cleanup. These will cool and solidify again. If they're still warm, you can remove them again and a clean your palette. But it's not necessary or just liquefy when you turn it on again. 16. Finishing Edges: When you have a finished painting and it's time to remove the tape and move on to the final finishing and framing. One option to do that, because you can see that often there's a lot of bumps and overlap where the wax has come over the edge of the surface. If you were to peel the tape off now, some of that might pull the wax surface actually and tear some of the painting front of the painting. So simple way to mitigate that is to use your loop scraper tool again and scrape a little bit of that edge. Remember you don't have to go all the way to the edge if you do, that's okay. But what we're really trying to do is just separate that drippy part from the surface. So just carefully scrape. And as it starts to get the excess, you can just peel that off and keep going. Whatever way is easiest for you to get a good grip on. Obviously that's not working for me. You can use either side too, but just be aware that this side is a little bit more rounded, at least on this loop tool. So it's not quite as It's not going to get you quite far enough into that part if you do accidentally go into your painting, that's okay. You can just kinda smoosh it down and, or re apply wax or reheat it and kinda remelt it on there. I really like to drag it across the surface like this. Because I find I have more control that way. We go little by little, turn and do the next bit. If you don't like the feeling of wax, probably won't like and cost it. But people wear gloves. I don't like wearing gloves because I'm always afraid they're going to melt my hands. I don't really need to get all of that. I just need to get the part that kinda up against the painting. All right. I think that's enough. I can take the tape off. And to do that I find one of the edges and then try to peel angled away from the painting as much as you can. That way, if any parts do get overlapping, they can just pull underneath instead of ripping it off the top. And you'll also notice that I'm touching the surface that should be fused. Everything that you've done to the surface should allow you to touch it. And in fact, we'll talk a little bit about the finishing of the painting, but the surface should be stiffen up and cool enough that you can touch it. You're doing this part. Sometimes a little wax bits will break off as you're doing this. So I tried to do it over an area that I don't care if that happens. There. It is. Nice. Finished and ready to print. 17. Framing: Today we're going to talk about framing our artwork. Once our pieces are finished, it's important to make sure that they're presented and protect it. And we're going to talk more about that in this next lesson. Okay, so now that we have finished our painting, the last step, and in my opinion, important step is to frame the piece. And framing not only helps to make the pieces look really nice and valuable, but also to protect these edges. So you can see that we've taken the tape off of the edges on these piece, on this piece. And so we don't have any kind of unwanted drips, but if you did, you could just take your scraper and scrape them off so that the edges nice and smooth and that will allow it to fit in the frame better. There are a few different ways that you can make frames or frame your encaustic paintings. And the way that I like best is to use a float frame. And a float frame is called this because it allows the piece to look like it's floating away from the frame. So a lot of pieces, if you go to the store and you buy like a regular Canvas frame, they look like they actually cover up part of the image and the PCE sits behind the frame like this, which is totally an okay way to do it. The drawback to that is that you will put pressure on your soft and caustic surface. But if you were going to leave it in the framing and, and care about that or didn't care about losing some of the edge, then you could certainly do that. But if you're like me and you do want to have the the nice edges kind of protected but also showing and not covered up. Then you can use what's called a float frame, which makes the piece float or seem like it's floating. This one has an actual painted edge and you can get some that are just raw wood or black, or white or gold. I mean, there's lots of different choices if you look up float frame. And what I like about different frames is some of them will actually raise the painting up. So it looks like it's above the frame. And some of them will make them look like they are more recessed. And the more recessed they are, the more protected they are. This one is meant for either a thin panel. So this is only three-quarters of an inch to an inch wide. So this painting fits nicely into this frame, but it also doesn't stick up too high. But if you had a wider painting where the edge, the panel was actually an inch and a half, then it would still fit into a frame like this. And the frame would be just about flush with the surface of the painting. And it would still keep those little edges protected. So I'm going to show you how to put it into two different types of frames. And these are store-bought frames. But you could pretty easily make your own. Float frames have particular store-bought frames have a little groove in them, so they're, they've been routed out a couple of times so that they have this lip here that allows the painting to look like it has space. And then it also has this part where the painting sits so that you can actually screw it in. And each of the store-bought frames come with their own hardware. Some of them require a like a little sort of s hook that connects the painting back to the piece. Some of them like this one. You just, they have grooves in them already and you just screw directly into the wood of your panel. And that keeps the peace connected to the frame. So it's important when you're doing either of these that you make sure that the painting is even. Because if it's tilted like this, if there's enough space, it'll get caught guide or if one of the areas is too high and that will not make it look nice and even. And so it's important that you measure that and make sure that that's even ahead of time. If you need to raise up your painting because there's too much space in-between. Where the frame is and where the panel ends, then you can get something that won't damage the surface of the painting. But that won't damage the surface of the painting, but we'll raise it up flush with the back of the frame. Like this so you can screw it in. So I'm just going to use another name for a blank panel to raise my piece up. Put it like this. Put my pieces face down. And then I'm going to put my frame on there like that. And now it's flush, press nicely against there. I'm going to make sure that it's nice and even really just by feel. But you can also use a measuring tape if you wish. And then we're gonna get some screws and just screw it into the frame. Okay, So if you, if you make your own and they don't come with screws, then you can by just regular wood screws. I like the Phillips head. These are counter sunk so that you can see the the little lip of the angle of the screw head will actually go down and it will be flushing, don't pop up over the top. So that's a good a good thing. And I always save home my old ones regardless of whether they're good or not, so I can use them again. So you just placed the screw into the slot. It's already cut out and I'm using a battery operated screwdriver drill combo. But you could certainly do this with just a handheld too. It's all the way in and go around all four sides until it's secured. Then just pretended to the other ones. When you turn it over, it should be even all the way around with the same amount of space for each side. If it's not, you can make slight adjustments. Then you have it framed. And then we'll talk about how to wire it. So we're going to set this in there. You can see there's a little bit of wiggle room. So if you did have any drips and your piece was just fitting snugly, that's okay. If you make your own panels and there are different size and you probably won't be able to buy a ready-made frame because they come in pretty standard sizes. This is 11 by 14 panel that was store-bought and an 11 by 14 frames. So that's one of the nice things about, or I guess the simple things about making using store-bought materials is that they are standard. So what I'm gonna do next, this one actually you can see how the frame, the panel sticks in rather than the frame. So it might be hard to actually screw it in. So what I'm going to use for that are these museum or mirror hangers. And one side goes into the frame and one side goes into the panel. Same thing I'll do all four sides. These required two screws For each is that it just screwing right into there. So I'm going to do for this is first I'm going to screw it into the panel just to make sure that it's in there before I actually put it down onto the frame. You can buy these little clips, these little mirror clips at a hardware store. Their angle, it just a little bit to get it down. Alright, now I'm gonna get another one and secure that. Of course, I would do all four of these. If you are having a hard time getting the screw to go into the woods, someone's are pretty hard. Then you can take a drill and actually pre drill your holes to match the size of the screw. Just want to drill bit that slightly skinnier than your screw. There we go. So it should fit snugly, it shouldn't wobble around like that. But you get the idea. Then. When you are ready to attach your wire, I'll show you how to do that too. They sometimes will include these, but also you can buy these at the hardware store. These D rings, which I use a lot. I really like this because you can position them wherever you want and they are kind of adjusting depending on where you put the wire. When you hang, it, just makes it really easy. So my rule of thumb for wire is to put the little D rings about a third of the way down. So if you divide the frame into three parts, the top third should be where you put the D rings. And just like before, we're just going to use the same screws screwed directly into the frame. They don't have to be very long. But you want to make sure that the head is wide enough that it's not going to go through the little hole. And you may have also noticed that I didn't I didn't measure. You can measure and mark. But the way that the wire works is it's going to adjust as you place it on the wall, so it's not super critical. Then one thing about wiring is that you want to make sure that the wire, first of all, is on the correct part of the painting. If you're wiring the bottom, then you wanna make sure that you're putting it on the top third, which it looks like I did. But for the sake of our demonstration, I'm just going to leave. What I'll probably end up doing is taking these out and flipping the painting rather than moving these because it looks like it's splitting a little bit. And if it's doing that and see that the wood is kinda splitting, what I'm gonna do is actually predrawn my hole so that the screws fit better and they don't split the wood. The screws are too wide or too fat. For instance, like this one. Then it really pushes and put strains the wood if there's not a whole already there to kinda help it in. So I've pre-cut this wire, but what I want to do is make sure that number one, that's gonna be a strong enough gauge. It's going to hold the painting. I'm costings aren't too heavy, but when you start getting large panels, then they can start getting kinda heavy. And I've cut it so that the there's about 4 " on either side of the frame. And that way I can secure it. I'm going to pull up kinda evenly. Then I'm going to pull it tight through those loops. And then I'm going to make another sort of not, I'm going to loop it through and loop it through. Kinda make a knot in the wire. And then I'm going to take the remainder and wrap it. Just going to wrap it around the wire. And all that excess will help to secure it so that it won't slip out. Just like extra insurance. Just wrap, wrap, wrap, wrap, wrap. Doesn't really matter which direction you wrap it. You just want to wrap it. In working in a frame shop, I learned this technique. I could pretty fast at it. And then one more thing that I really like to do with frames to avoid getting scuff marks on your wall, but also to protect the wall from getting scratched by the raised up elements is to put little rubber bumpers on the bottom and sometimes the top of the frame. Then you're ready to hang it and you can see that it will stretch a little bit. But if it's at the third, the top third and not the top quarter than the wire will be what's supporting it and not the frame. Pieces primed and ready to go. 18. Thank You: Thank you for watching and caustic Studio basics. I hope this course gave you a really good idea of how to create your first encaustic painting. And I can't wait to see all of your projects and paintings uploaded in the project area. If you'd like to see more of my own work, you can visit my website at Dana Harris seeger.com.