You Have a Future In….Wax?

Deep River, originally uploaded by carolsLittleWorld.

Today’s upload is destined to be covered in wax.

While in Iceland, visiting an area I came to call “Satan’s Paintbrush” (more on this later) I shot some of these natural abstracts. The earth in that area has strange colors and I wanted to work with the palette there, to make these sort of swaths of color, which I could then later dip in the wax. It’s hard to get these colors sometimes in wax so I sometimes work in photography, get deep dark rich colors like the palette you see here and then add copious amounts of wax as a top coat.

I haven’t decided if I’m going to do that to this piece or if I’m going to print in on translucent paper and sort of “float” it in the wax just yet. Either one of those though, will give me an option for bringing these colors, this rich earthy color palette over to the wax world.

Once you start working in wax, working with the encaustics, you tend to see everything as having a future in wax. Everything, every little thing in the entire man-made universe, you look at it and think, “oh gosh, I *so* could dip that in wax.” It’s pretty crazy and I think it leaves you with a skewed view of the world but now I have that, don’t I? I’ve even started to look at nature in different ways. Instead of “oh how pretty!” I’m walking around thinking, “ok, now what could I dip in the wax?”

Wax works. No really wax WORKS. It makes stuff look cool. It preserves stuff. It brings entire new life into old things and, heck, you can even “float” some new things (some things like photos) in the wax to make super cool new stuff. It works and it’s fun to work with the wax in new ways. Sometimes frustrating, yes, but sometimes really very fun.

I have grown to covet the blow torch and curse (but love) the heat gun. Seriously, I have. Honestly, I love working in wax. Now that it’s not so hot and the fire dangers are (maybe a little?) less present, I’m hoping I’ll be able to get out into the studio again to have some additional play time because, well, because over the course of the summer, over my trip to Iceland and in the course of my travels, I’ve got a big pile of stuff that would *so* look good in wax.

Now that it’s autumn, I need more studio time, don’t you think? And I hope to get some, over the course of the coming weeks. I’m gearing up to spend a lot of the winter months in studio, doing little more than playing with wax. I’m looking forward to that. I want to go out there and just play, play, play with wax.

So, the next time you see this it’s probably going to be mixed with wax (somehow) and I’ll be sure to post the results, once I’m finished, to the blog so you can share in my wax delights.

Until next time…