Process

Thought it might be good to get it down how I make my mixed media pieces on board…so here goes.

The first thing I do is take myself and my camera out for a walk - sometimes with other people and sometimes alone, or with my dog - it depends on the day. I take some photographs and then edit them looking for images that I want to work with. I’ve always been a sucker for lonely poles and trees, so these pop up a lot in my work.

I then edit any images I want to work with in Photoshop, usually bumping up exposure and contrast and a few other edits to get the image to a place where I want it and where I know (or think I know) that I can work on it. the first image is the original image and the 2nd image is the edited image.

Next step is to print the images to size and glue it to the wooden board. I leave the glue to dry overnight and stack a pile of heavy books on top of the boards to ensure it adheres properly

I trim the edges off and tape of the sides of each board and then coat each piece in up to 3 layers of encaustic medium - I have made my own in the past by these days I use R&F’s medium as it’s just beautiful. I usually work on quite a few pieces at the same time so I can get a lot done in 1 day - it just takes me a long time to get to that 1 day.

Now is the really fun part - adding pigments and paint to the piece - sometimes this can go horribly wrong and sometimes it can go beautifully, that’s the fun part.

It’s pretty difficult to capture the texture of a piece of encaustic art in a photograph but taken at an angle you can get an idea of how the texture looks on the finished piece.

The finished piece… for now

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