Santa Fe Workshop Day 1

I get to take this road back to my motel every day after the workshop.

I am into my Encaustic Intensive Workshop. Love what I am learning from Jill Burkholder! There are 12 of us women plus Mike, the studio assistant. Lots of creative female energy floating around.

Re: Encaustic- This is an ancient process of creating artwork. It involves adding layers of bees wax to photographs or collages or using pigmented wax to create paintings.

We spent the first day experimenting with various techniques. We learned to prepare a board and then coat it with layers of wax, fuse it,etc. It is extremely difficult to get a smooth surface! Since this is workshop for photographers we experimented with various ways of imbedding or transferring images to a waxed board! We also learned about applying color with oil sticks, pastels, and pigmented wax. Below is my practice board.


The communal wax pot!-


Pigmented wax-

Several of my fellow classmates printed an image on watercolor paper and glued it to a board in preparation for tomorrow's day of work. I decided to gesso my board instead as I wanted to print my image on rice paper to add to the board.

All my classmates are fun to work with and I loved seeing their many different styles in photography. Jill made the entire process relaxed and encouraged us all to experiment with the process so we know what we like and what we don't like!

Tomorrow we get to work with one of our own images. Yea!