Who doesn’t have fun playing with molten wax and fire…
The latest printmaking journey took me down the road of exploring encaustic medium to create collagraph plates. I found this a very fun process. After all, its all about the process.
So many questions about the combining of the encaustic and collagraph printing… Where to start? What kind of marks can be made? can you keep the profile of the plate thin enough to get a good print? what kind of tools would be best to make certain marks? Would plexiglass be an adequate plate material for both the plate creation and printing it?
For the plate material, I used some 1/8″ plexiglass scraps I had laying around the studio. No special prep to plexiglass other than to just make sure it was clean and free of any debris.
The encaustic medium was my own formula that I have been working with for my encaustic painting explorations. It is a mixture of raw beeswax and damar resin. The encaustic medium was heated to molten and kept between 180 – 200 degrees. **if you want to try this, please make sure to have cross ventilation in your workspace**
Now on to the tools, what tools should be used for mark making? For the mark making tools I used some of the obvious tools: brushes and palette knifes. I also raided my stash of clay tools ( I knew those would come in handy some day), some baking / decorating silicone tools, anything I could find really that I thought would hold up to the molten wax.
Now on to the plates. Once I got started, I found this to be an absolutely freeing experience playing with the mark making and seeing what kind of information you could build up on.
Brushes would make various marks, some expected and some not. The silicone brushes behaved differently that what I would have expected, not sure what I think of them quite yet. More play needs to happen with them before I can decide. I would like to get my hands on some of the silicone wedges. I could see their usefulness. Palette knifes were versatile in different styles of mark making. The various clay tools were useful too, especially creating intaglio lines in the plate once there was a layer of wax on the plexi.
Overall, this was a great exploration with this medium and mark making. Now the next test to see how they print…
More to come….
Daylene Horn Art 