portrait

Florence, encaustic on panel (in progress)

Well, I have a whole new respect for the use of encaustic.  I made the portrait above on Tuesday as a sample piece to go with my classroom demonstration on Wednesday.  It was quite a learning experience– actually quite frustrating until I stopped thinking of the process as “painting”.  The brush was just a means of getting wax from the hot plate to the panel, after which the real work was accomplished with a warm carving knife.  Plenty of scraping, blending, and reshaping was involved.  I hope to finish the piece some time next week.  In the mean time, I am preparing for a demonstration of traditional egg tempera.