Encaustic Monotype Printmaking

1. Encaustic Monotype Intro: Hi, I'm Dana Seeger. Welcome to this course on encaustic Monotype. Encastic Monotype is a really awesome way to make prints without a press. This is an example of one of the encaustic monotypes we will create in this class. It has a very loose and fluid and free look and you can combine it with stencils and other types of printmaking to make it a really unique one of a kind image. Let's go. 2. Class Project: The project for this class is going to be a series of encaustic monotypes. And I say series because you can't make just one. The encaustic monotype method lends itself really well to making multiple unique images. Once you start painting on the surface of the plate, it's really hard to stop. So we're just going to keep going, keep layering and create about ten unique prints on different pieces of paper. 3. Encaustic Monotype Materials: U. These are some of the materials that we need for encaustic monotype. We need a hot plate. In this case, I have a anodized aluminum surface, which is nice for, um, seeing your colors because sometimes what I use to heat up my palette is a pancake griddle. But with Teflon coating, it's hard to have the encaustic stay on the surface. So these are encaustic pigment sticks made by RNF encaustics and it's just really a dense pigment mixed with the encaustic medium, which is beeswax and Damar resin. That's what this is just a clear beeswax mixed with Damar resin and that allows the end result to be a little bit harder and more durable than just beeswax alone. It also raises the melting point so that it doesn't melt at a lower temperature, melts around 180 to 200 degrees. So I've got all kinds of different colors here that I can spread on my palette and these are sticks that are also made by encaustic coos, which is an encaustic pigment company. You could make your own using little molds, oil paint or dry pigment and blending them into the encaustic medium. Then we've got our paper, of course. The paper that we're using today is a Japanese rice paper and mulberry paper. This is a sumi paper for Sumi drawing. This is a mulberry paper called Hosho we're also working with ncostaflex, which is a really cool fiberytaper that's made specifically for encaustic painting and encaustic monotype because it stays flexible, doesn't get cracky when the encostic gets embedded into it. I really like it for the monotypes because you can just leave them as is or embed them into a painting. So those are the papers we're using. We might also incorporate things like stencils. You might need some encaustic paint brushes. Then you also might need Something to smooth the paper down. I like these hard plastic scrapers, use a credit card, you can use a wooden spoon. The surface is not super hot. It's only about, like I said, 180 to 200 degrees. Even if you touch it, it's not going to burn you. If you put your finger on it and held it there, it might burn you, but you can also use your fingers to burnish the back. I'll show you how to do that. The fun tool is one that has these bridges in it so that you can actually scrape through the paint and make different patterns and lines and things like that. Something like this might be also fun. Silicone works well because it's heat safe. You can use silicone basting brushes. To work really well. If it's heat safe, you could probably use it. The stencil material that I like is Durlar. It's just called stencil making material. It's a hard plastic, but it doesn't melt when you put it on the hot plate. 4. Paper Tearing Tip: Mm hmm. With encaustic monotype, one of the types of papers that I like to use is a thin mulberry paper, a Japanese long grain paper, one way to size it down from its full sheet is to cut it or you can tear it a trick for tearing the paper because it is such a long grain paper, sometimes it's hard to tear. I'll put my ruler on the place where I want to tear it, and then I'll take a wet brush. And I will dampen the area that I'm going to be tearing along. By dampening that area with a little bit of water, it just really helps to loosen those fibers and makes it much easier to tear along that line. Then you end up with this nice raggedy deckled edge that mimics the edge that was made when the paper was made. 5. Encaustic Safety: I just want to talk for a second about a couple safety tips. So if you're going to be using your brushes or a stir stick, for instance, and you get them right out of the wax or off the hot plate, they're going to be warm. They're not going to probably give you third degree burns, but the warm wax will coat your finger like a candle dripping on your finger. It's about like that. The hot plate and the pan are 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's going to catch on fire. It's not going to start an 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 hot plate, if I'm not going to clean them, then 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 that you can also put it upright, but that will allow the brush or the um, tool to cool without sticking to a surface. 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 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 a good experience and not a scary experience. 6. Starting Out: One way I like to start is by doing a little drawing with some pastels. You can use pastels. You can use things that China markers or even oil pastels and these are going to be okay when you put them on the hot plate and they'll just fuse in. Pastels might offset onto the hot plate, which is also okay. You might use that as another type of color and so you can do all kinds of marks. You can take the pastel and make marks on the side. You could do a whole drawing. But that's a fun way to start out your caustic monotype. Have fun play with that. Once you have your monotype, you can always go over it with other materials too, like pastels or oil crams, things like that are compatible to go over your finished painting. All right. Once you have either you want to start fresh with a blank piece of paper or you want to start with something you've already drawn on, one of the first ways to make an image with your encaustic monotype is to just start using your encaustic paints, your paint sticks on the palette and you can spread them around. They will melt with the heat of palette. So it's always a little bit you don't always know what you're going to get, which is cool I think because I like working that way. I'm just going to take a blank piece and I'm going to put it face down and you can see that it's absorbing the color and you can pick it right up or you could use your scraper tool and bread the paper onto the surface. Then when you pull it up, you have that image, a mirror image just like a print would be, but you don't need to press, you just need the heat and then caustic paint. So we can keep layering. We can use what's here, we can add more, add more color. We can take our scratching tool and scratch the marks into it. Let's see. You can make big swirls. The longer you leave it on, the more it's going to melt and the more saturated it will be, but also the more paint you'll have. Just be aware of that. It will absorb into the paper, usually, but it might bleed and give you interesting results. That's another version. These can just be set aside to cool as you continue working. 7. Cleaning the Palette: When you're ready to clean up your palette, whether that's to end your session or because you want to just use a different color, I bunch up a paper towel so that I'm not touching the surface of the palette, making a little pad, and then just clean by wiping it down. If you want it super dubrilean, you can put some soy wax RNF makes a soy wax, which is a brush cleaner and it's also a palette cleaner. Sprinkle a little bit of that on and then wipe it off. 8. Printing: Now I can move to a different color. Let's say I want to use, this is clear. I want to use some white. I'm going to I'm going to put some white up here. Because I've actually got a brush warming on the plate and I'm going to use a brush and make some brushy marks. Then once I got that, I can go in with keep that warm, the paper towel or tips or something else that makes marks and that down. Now I'm using my encaustic flux. Cost flex. That's more subtle. See if we can't add some more. Go. Warm that brush up. Caustic, everything has to be warm. That does. I can put my hand down and it's not too hot. That's what that looks like. That's nice. I can also take a previous print and I can lay this down, let's do it on the bottom part. And I can start to layer. The longer you leave a piece of previously printed paper on the hot plate, your wax that's already on the paper will start to offset. You might get some more bleeding or different looks, so just be aware of that the way that that might work. Then you can just keep layering and layering, cleaning if you want to in between in between area, get a little soy wax on there. I want to have that once. So we just sprinkle a little of the soy wax. Then take our paper towel and it acts like a cleaner. This is some clear medium, which will make it more transparent. I can make sort of like a gray Grey tone. Then the more transparent color you have, the more you're going to see through and make the paper translucent, which I like because then I can layer it over other papers and the previous layer will show through or layered on another encaustic painting, and it will show through. We could just keep layering and layering, like I said, and then I'll show you some more techniques that you can build on top of in a different way. 9. More techniques: You can see that the more encaustic builds up, the less absorbent the surface. The first initial print transfer is going to be a little bit more true to what was put down. It will blur a little more as you build up those layers just because it's not absorbing it as much. So We've done prints that were traditionally printed, let's say, face down and the pigment was picked up onto the paper. Now let's try something else where we put the paper down on hot plate because paper will be fine at 200 degrees, it's not going to burn or anything like that. What we can do is we can warm this brush. We can actually paint on the surface. We can get some of our pigment, the printing palette also doubles as a palette. I I get my brush full of pigment, I can actually paint on the front of the paper because the paper is now warm, it will absorb into the encaustic paint will absorb into the paper. I can even take my pastel while it's still warm, and I can do some drawing and it will fuse in as I'm drawing. Then if I wanted to do, let's say, That's funny. Let's say I wanted to do some maybe add some white. Take my white brush. And start layering over. Just like a painting. But you're doing it on paper. Let's pour out some encaustic medium. You'll see the translucent quality. Now when I paint over how it gets clear and transparent. You just keep building this way on the plate until you're ready to take it off. Then I hold it off the heat for a couple of seconds before I place it down onto another surface because the back will also have some wax. If you put it down onto a surface, it might get stuck. But these are cool marks that we can then maybe take and put on another one. You can see where I'm going with this, how you can just keep building and adding and layering until you have a deep imagery. You can see how that translucent use this one, how the paper starts to show through. It gets really nice from laying. 10. Monotype with stencils: Another fun way to add depth and dimension and interest to your caustic monotypes is with stencils and pan pastels. You can put I do this off the heat. It's not on the hot pad, but I take the Pam pastel. The stencil material, like I said, is a durlar. It's a plastic, a hard durable plastic. You can take a tip, your finger, tissue, or a little makeup sponge and hold down the stencil and then dab the color. Because the pastel doesn't have any binder, you have to heat set it onto the palette. The way I do that is when you're done, lift up the stencil. It's really easy to clean the stencils too. I'll show you that in a minute. Then just put it on the palette, face up for a couple seconds. Can use your to brace it, get it warm and you'll start to feel it stick and it will start to melt in. Then once it's melted in, then you can pull it off and it won't rub off. Again, keep layering those up and have fun with pencils. Then when you're ready to clean it, you just take your handy dandy paper towel and wipe it off. If you need to add a little heat to it to get it off, you can also clean it on the hot plate too and that'll help. Looks like that. Then you're ready to switch colors. 11. Gelli Plate Additions: Alright, so in this video, I am showing you how to add jelly plate printing to your monotype. The paper is sitting on the hot plate, so it's warm at about 180 degrees. And I've used an oil stick. In this case, I'm using RNF oil paint sticks, which have some wax in them, and they have pigment and some linseed oil. And I'm just drawing directly on the gel plate. This is a little gel plate, commercially bought purchased gel plate, and it's sitting on the warm plate, and I'm just doing it straight on the paper. The one thing to remember is if you're using the oil stick, it's not wax pigment stick, so it's not encaustic medium. It's oil paint, and it might stain your surface. So if you're using this method and you're using the oil paint sticks, then you'll want to make sure that you're doing it directly on the paper instead of putting it on the palette and transferring it. Anything that you put on the palette should be just the encaustic medium or the wax. So now I'm adding the encaustic paint, which is melting on the hot plate. I'm adding that just by painting directly onto the paper over the oil stick, the gel print. Can see how it's really compatible. So once you get it on the paper, because it's warm, it fuses in, and I'm doing this on encostiflex paper, which is sort of a fibrocy paper. It's kind of thick and it's very durable. It handles a lot of layers of wax and just kind of absorbs it. So that's sitting warm on the hot plate. And I can put the oil stick. I can either draw on the paper directly on the paper while it's sitting on the warm plate. But what I don't want to do, like I said, is draw with the oil stick on the palette unless you want it to stain. But it's really nice for doing the transfer, the printmaking method because it's very sort of malleable and juicy and it has a lot of pigment, so you get a really nice look, sort of a different look than you do with just the encaustic medium. So here I am now painting just clear medium on top, and that's going to make the print more transparent. It kind of softens the look of some of the pigment that I've already put down, and it helps to kind of build up another layer of transparency. You can use stencils through the gel print the gel plate with either oil paint. You can paint through them with oil paint, or I haven't tried pan pastels, but you could try pan pastels on the gel plate. The cool thing about the jelly plate is that you can make multiple copies. So once you put down one print, a lot of the pigment will be expended, but you can make multiple kind of versions of the print, and it's a fun way to just add a different texture, add a different look, and it just blends really nicely into the print, as you can see. Okay. 12. Thank you: Well, I hope you enjoyed our ncostic monotype class and got some inspiration for your next PresslessPrintmking.