Like Lorraine Glessner, I have a mostly-love relationship with encaustic.  I’ve used encaustic wax, beeswax tempered with resin, as a finishing layer, and as a medium for collage, sometimes swearing with frustration, but eventually marveling at its translucent qualities.

As a finished product, though, it is a bit delicate, so I’ve been  trying other finishes like acrylic and aluminum. But then, an artist friend, Sharon Grader, was talking about encaustic monoprints — making images on a plate, and lifting up the result onto paper. I’ve created monoprints as a printmaking process, with relief or etching ink, but not with wax. I wondered, what could it hurt to try? And encaustic came back with a lot of love: it creates AMAZing texture.

Here’s one of my random attempts, just brushing colored wax onto a heated plate, and capturing the colors and texture onto paper.  Per usual, I let the print dry and scanned the result. Fair warning: it’s a little sticky on the scanner bed.

I didn’t think much of it, until I decided on a whim to load the scan in as a layer for digital collage. Then, the richness of the texture really shone through. Check out the bottom left of this image, where I’ve overlaid the encaustic scan from above. I’m pleased with the results, and am now applying encaustic layers to every work in progress!

The immediacy of the hands-on result is an interesting contrast to the deliberately scanned layer, which then feels like aging and decay when it’s used as part of the composition. Given my love of both history and technology, it’s a great fit. Don’t you love it when a chance comment sparks a whole new enterprise?