Playing around a bit

I am still on my encaustic adventure and loving every minute.
After talking with an artist friend of mine Pam, about encaustic painting she informed me that she was making some wax medium cakes the next day. I was so fortunate to get to go to her studio and soak in so much information.
All my raw materials have been ordered and I have been collecting everything I need to make my own paints. It is very expensive start up but if I paint like I want to I will not be able to afford that amount of paints I would need. Crossing fingers I mix up a good first batch as soon as everything gets here. Until then here is what I have been working on....

A few years ago my parents went to a yard sale and found a ton of leather working tools and stamps and this little letter press stamps for like $20. It was this mans kids selling his whole leather working studio full of tools and dyes. Well the cart that every thing was on was what my dad wanted so he gave us all the tools and neat stuff. I have 100's of stamps both letters and images and knew that I wanted to use them for something someday and I think I might have found the perfect non-traditional use for them. HOT WAX!!!! :)

First I dug out a bunch of sketchbooks I had been missing for a while. Scanned in this image of a moose I had drawn. Printed it out in archival inks and then cut it out. Here I am deciding where I want to encase it in wax on my gessoed board.

How about right here :)

Heating up wax....

Moose drawing is in...and then I came back in with some colored wax paints and really just dabbled some on. I had my letter stamps ready to be punched into the hot wax once I torched the last layer with the heat gun. Of course if you look close enough you will see that the "E" got punched in backwards which was not on purpose but I decided to roll with it.

Then I came back in and did a little carving. Rubbed on some black oil paint into the stamped/carved areas and then rubbed most of the extra oil paint off the surface. I love the depth the oil paints adds to the wax surface. I for see hours of fun in my future! ah

I am really happy with the end result. And this is my first Encaustic to be listed in my Etsy shop! yay
You can find "Moose" here.

I will be documenting my paint making very closely so keep an eye out for future posts on this! wheeeee (and as always thanks for stopping in).