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Encaustic card workshop no.1

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  What we did: Learn the basics of encaustic ironworks; use a low temperature iron and a heated stylus and scraper tools to paint with hot pigmented wax.    Experiment with loading the iron with coloured wax and passing it gently over the paper to make backgrounds, then using the iron in different ways to add patterns and shapes.   Use the stylus like a hot pen to add lines and dots of wax and then scrape away wax to add detail and contrast. Different styles and effects demonstrated and plenty of time (and encaustic card) to experiment with. To keep us going there was flapjack..... fortunately Willow stayed out of the way and took his supervisory role very lightly..... What I learned: * Hot wax is hard to control - the beauty of it is that it will flow into beautiful shapes and textures but that can also be very frustrating if you are used to a medium where you 100% control the marks you make. * People who perceive that they are not very artistic often get the best results (in my subje
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More tigers...

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 I have this reputation of being an unemotional person, I don't think it is true, I just don't wear my feelings as an outer garment. The tigers got me though - that moment I first saw a tiger in the wild; A massive cool cat strolling out of the jungle, ignoring the insignificant humans. My eyes watered so much I struggled to see.  There was very little light which made getting sharp non-noisy pictures a real challenge but here it is, casual endangered apex predator. My next challenge has been to capture that look. It shouldn't take 6 months to finish a charcoal drawing but this one did, not because I spent crazy amounts of time on it. I just got stuck, couldn't get the look, so I went off in dozens of different directions before returning to it this week. I realise now that it's OK to do that, to have 100 tabs open at once, but it's definitely satisfying to decide that's enough. This one is done. The question is, can you name the song from the photo?
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Hampshire Open studios - I WILL be ready....

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 Turning the she-shed into an art gallery for open studios didn't sound like too much hard work but it's taken quite a bit of lifting and shifting to get this far.... Still go a way to go......but this was the middle of last week: but it's come a long way since '21's lock-down shed project! Come and have a look during Hampshire open Studios.
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I’m just going down to the shed to set fire to my painting.

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 'Just going down the shed to set fire to my painting,' as the words left my lips I realised I was simply happy. It didn’t matter that nobody saw it, nobody bought it, nobody thanked me. There was just something about setting fire to a painting that gave me a sense of unpredictable satisfaction. So what exactly was I doing?  Dry shellac burn : I’ve got a small cradled panel with several layers of encaustic medium (beeswax mixed with damar resin) I have been painted over these with alcohol inks. I’ve covered the dry Alcohol Inks with shellac and left it to dry overnight. With my favourite new toy, the baby blowtorch, I heated the surface and produced coloured cells. To be honest the wet shellac burn was more fun as the flames were better (the alcohol set fire and burned off) but the dry one gave much bigger clearer cells and I’m starting to get the look I was after. Of course, having got the look I was after, I then overworked it with several other ideas and it turned out rather
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Location: Swanwick, Southampton SO31 1BJ, UK
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