I met with my local fiber group today and we played with beeswax and encaustic techniques. I had never tried this before and it was pretty interesting how the layers of wax and oil paint work together.

 The first step is to paint a layer of beeswax on a board. You can then mark the beeswax and apply oil paint into the marks.

 Once the oil paint works into the cracks, you wipe the surface of the wax with a canola oil on a paper towel.

 It then leaves the paint in the cracks. This is one of Jan’s pieces.

 You can then heat the wax again with a heat gun or a blow torch to move the wax and paint around. You keep adding layers of wax and paint. You can also collage in a variety of things such as papers. We used yellow beeswax so the results are on the yellow to orange side.

 These are the ones that I made. I had a hard time getting a good photo. This one has a piece of dyed paper towel on the first layer.

 This one has wool added to the first layer. The wool made the wax very bubbly and dimensional.

 This one has another dyed paper towel as the base.

 I can’t remember all the layers on this but it’s mainly paint.

This has pieces of “leather” paper I made several years ago with beeswax and paint. It’s hard to get the wax to react as you think it should look. I was just experimenting to see what would happen. This isn’t something I think I’ll do all the time but it was fun trying out the process.