Painting flowers in hot wax

Video Demonstration : Encaustic Art

This latest video from Art In Wax show me painting in hot wax some summer flowers.
The flowers are based on a clematis style flower, we have many clematis coming into flower in our garden at the moment. Clematis come in many shapes and sizes and wonderful colours, we have three varieties ourselves with the small compact pink blooms coming early in May to larger white and a purple variety blooming as the summer progresses.

The flowers I have painted here are “in the style of” a clematis, with so many types to choose from this is my own interpretation, as with many of my paintings I consider the subject to be an impression of.

Demonstration

The film shows how the flower is painting in hot wax, and gives reference to the watercolour I painted a few days ago. I have recently rekindled my fondness for watercolors and using them in parallel with the wax is great fun.

See for yourself

The pictures below show what I’ve been working on in this subject. The watercolour I used as a reference in the video below is the pink one on the right and the center picture is done using watercolour pencils, which I find great to sketch with, the framed paintings are both Encaustic paintings and approximatley A5 in size and are for sale, contact me for details and availability.

And this is the video now live :

If you have enjoyed seeing this demonstration please leave me a comment or perhaps share a link to this page on twitter or facebook.

Sweet Peas – An English Summer Favorite

Having just sown some sweet pea seeds in the garden last week, we are looking forward to one of our favorite flowers blooming in the summer. Sweet peas are a delicate and beautiful plant with an abundance of flowers and a very sweet scent.

The sweet pea was developed by Henry Eckford via wikipedia a nurseryman of the Victorian era, which has been developed and evolved into the sweet peas, in many varieties we know today.

Inspired to paint

So I thought why not – Paint some Sweet Peas!

I did some sketching and you can see how I got on below, I did my pencil drawing and then my encaustic painting. I like to sketch sometimes before stating my hot wax pictures, I use this as a guide more than something to copy from, but they help me keep on track so to speak as I get invloved with the wax. I then decided to doodle on the drawing with some watercolour paints and this is what I ended up with ……..

Encaustic Painting : Sweet Peas

This is the encaustic, hot wax version of the painting, it is an A4 encaustic painting on gloss card, it was created using some of my favorite colours, pinks and purples …… now just got to wait for the real flowers to grow and flower in the garden.

Sunflower Valley : Presented Mounted and Photographed

Original Art in hot wax : Sunflowers

I have just finished this piece featuring a valley of sunflowers.

I worked in hot wax on a A3 gloss card painting using my hot iron and stylus tools together with a heat gun for remelting the wax once applied.

I have been painting a lot of Sunflowers of late, and this piece took about 10 hours in several sessions for me to get to where I wanted to be. I used to find I liked to finish a painting in one or two sessions but I have changed the way I work now and often feel coming back to a piece after a few hours or days break I can see how to develop the picture, and as encaustic wax is so versatile I can easily remelt and rework the piece until I am happy with the work.

Photographing Art Work

It can be a challenge photographing artwork to show online. I find that with my wax art it can be difficult to show the subtlety of the work as when displayed on a computer screen lines in the wax which add a great texture in real life can look clumsy when photographed. Likewise the colours and the sheen, although they do show, often have much more depth than represented in online screen view.

Presenting and showing artwork online

It is also, at times, difficult to know how to present the paintings, I sometimes use a display easel to demonstrate how a painting could be displayed or a frame, which can help show how a piece maybe used. But this doesn’t always give the true feeling of size.

When we photographed the “Splash of colour – flower meadow” paintings this week I decided to hold the pictures to give a perspective to the size. I had a fellow artist comment on how effective this was and so again with this painting I am showing it in relationship to its surroundings and me holding it.

This picture is approx. 16 x 11 in size and the mount in a mid to dark blue really highlights the golden yellows of the Sunflower subject I feel.

What do you think?

What do you think?
Why not leave me a blog comment below.

Flower Meadow : A real splash of colour

I have been working on some larger pieces of encaustic art recently and this is one of them and is just over 16 x 11 inches in size.

I paint from my imagination most of the time, and on the day I started this painting I wanted to use lots of colour, and over the three sessions it took to complete I added more and more layers of coloured wax and as you can see below its a “real splash of colour”.

This picture was great fun to paint, I let my imagination flow with the wax, adding all sorts of flowers into this meadow type scene ……. as you can see we also had fun taking the photos …..

Mix Media Artwork : Watercolor, Ink and Wax

As someone who loves many types of art I am always interested to see and try new things, especially with wax as this is my passion as an artist.

The way I paint using wax, I use a formulated wax medium which is already coloured and ready for use. I mostly paint onto a specialist encaustic gloss card. My style of painting is a light coating of wax, it has texture and sheen but is not as deep as some encaustic painting styles that have many layers of wax.

There are many styles of “Encaustic Art” and a wide and varied range of techniques, each with its own unique and special use of the wax. Some are deep layered paintings craved out through the wax, others are painted with a brush, and some use mixed media techniques, using photographs and collage type styles.

I do like to try new things and enjoyed my experience of working with canvas board and deep layers of wax when painting roses last year, I blogged about it “First experience of painting wax on canvas”.

Art In Wax Experimenting Again!

I love to experiment with wax and for a change I decided to try adding a layer of wax to a couple of paintings which are drawings in pencil, which I then painted in watercolour and added some ink pen too.

I have created two pictures at an ACEO size (2.5 x 3.5 inches), I thought I would start small to see have the wax reacted to the card, which was a porous surface rather than my normal encaustic gloss card and the results are very interesting …….

I don’t draw onto my card when I am painting an encaustic painting, I do sometimes make stretches to work from but mostly I paint free hand and from my imagination when using wax, so this is a different way of working with wax for me.

As you can see from these ACEO pictures I have pencil drawn my subject I then painted in watercolours, and using some coloured ink pens define some of the lines a little to give a drawn effect. In the meadow picture the lines enhence the rustic feel of the drawing and for the poppies the ink gives depth the the petals I feel.

Once totally dry, I left them overnight, I used clear wax medium and coated the pictures in the wax using a heated iron tool, which fused the wax to the picture.

The paintings now have a wonderful shine now they have had a light polish and yet the colours of the watercolour are still bright as they were before, they have a very slight texture.

Comments Welcome

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