Today I’m going to share with you three ways to save time and money when painting oversized encaustic paintings. The answer in a nutshell, is underpainting.
The way I have always approached art is with a curiosity to learn the mediums, how they behave in general and how they will interact with other mediums. I love taking creative courses in any discipline: this fuels my creative muscles and pushes my instinctive creative behaviours. Art classes = My dopamine-release of choice! People always ask me to recount the story of how I discovered that I could soundly combine my two favourite mediums mixed media (acrylic based), and encaustic in the same piece.
For years, because these two incompatible materials, were my paintings mediums of choice, I had to separate my time between both. I either had encaustic days or mixed media days but never the two would meet at the same time until one fated day… A friend invited me to a furniture painting course where we would learn about the properties of mineral based paints. When finishing my adorable little bench painting, the lightbulb was quickly turned on, when the instructor said the following. “ Now, we are going to seal and finish our beautifully painted furniture with… (are you ready for this???), BEESWAX! I knew that my days of incompatible favourite mediums was behind me and my program, “Two World’s Collide”, the stable approach to combining mixed media with encaustic, was born.
Today I am going to bet that somewhere along the line, you took an encaustic course, whether it was in person, online or self-directed by watching and reading and you learned how to prep your panel in one or two materials/products. Done-zo! Word. I am going to give you a few more options to consider before diving into repetition each time you paint.
Those poor little dying bees would tell you, that if you could reduce how much wax you are consuming by underpainting, you’d save their tired little asses! I’m not kidding at all. By underpainting your paintings, you’ll be saving a lot of money on your overall wax consumption. You’ll also be saving time - making your paintings come out faster and with surprising little effort…. Imagine that, being in the flow instead of swimming against the current!
That wraps up my list of favourite materials/methods for saving myself money and time by underpainting my encaustic pieces. My suggestion is that if you haven’t tried some of these materials or methods, DO. Experiment, play, figure it out. Besides the obv question, what have you got to lose?, I’d like to know what you’ll do with all the spare time/money you’re going to have/save in your next date with encaustic?!
Compulsively creative always,
Christina