Friday, March 29, 2013

Illustration Friday: Egg


A few years ago I made this book about Western Bird's Eggs. I wanted to try making a book with encaustic pages. Encaustic is a wax-based paint and it has to be warm to manipulate it. While painting you usually have puddles or jars of paint on an electric griddle and you can apply it with brushes, pieces of cardboard, palette knives or whatever works. You can carve into the paint, scrape it away, or add other color with oil sticks.


To make these pages I painted on mat board because whatever you are painting on has to be pretty rigid. I didn't want the outside of the book to be waxy, so I painted a sheet of paper with watered-down acrylic paint. I really like how the full sheet of paper turned out but I didn't take a photo of it.



This was a fun experiment for me but not one I tried again. If you want to see beautiful encaustic work, check out my friends' websites:
Laura Wait www.laurawait.com
Susan Thompson www.susanjthompson.com

Happy Easter!

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