I’ve been doing a bit of practicing recently. Encaustic is one of my favorite artistic mediums to use in mixed media art, but there are times when using my heat tool can really mess up the look I’m trying to create if I’m not very careful.

With this piece, I used a little oil paint with the wax to get that green color. I used chunks of tim holtz’ tissue paper with the chunks of color to create a color blocking effect, and then it was time to add my paper pieces. Usually when I add these to my encaustic pieces, I just set them on the surface, brush some wax over the top, and use my heat tool to fuse the pieces with the wax. This doesn’t really work that well, especially if I want the wax to be smooth without little pebbles in between the paper pieces. Plus, I did not want to mess up the squares of color and paper I had created. So this time, I worked slowly.

I set the pieces on the wax and pushed them in as far as I could. I did this step a few times after heating the area very slightly, each time pushing them a little further into the wax. Once I could see a build up around the bottom of each piece, I used my heat tool to very carefully fuse the build up of wax with the bottom of the paper. It took a while and I didn’t quite get it right on some areas, but for the most part I was able to fuse my paper pieces into the wax without having a build up on top or in between the pieces. It will take some more practice (and patience!) but this is how I’ll be adding elements to my encaustic art from now on.