Encaustic Monoprint Workshop

On September 19th and 20th I went to a workshop with Elise Wagner for encaustic monoprinting. Elise is a well-known encaustic painter from Portland, Oregon who I learned about from Linda Womack when I took the basic encaustic workshop with her. Elise makes her own line of encaustic paints and has a wonderful gallery of paintings on line here. Be sure to check them out.

Our task for the first day was to do a little encaustic painting on a birch panel to get the feel of the wax. We learned to imbed images, do image transfers and other cool stuff. Everyone was very excited about the possibiities. In the afternoon we started our encaustic plates for the monoprints. This involves applying white (or any color really) encaustic wax paint onto a plexiglass plate. You can either paint your design, or add wax and then carve, melt, scrape to get your design. My first plate was a flop so I ended up scraping off all the wax and starting over. I ended up with this...


















For my first print I intaglio inked the plate with pthalo blue and yellow ochre water soluble intaglio inks by Akua. This was my first time using these inks and I was impressed with how easy they were to use. I loved the fact that they could just be washed off with a little dish soap and warm water (but not too warm, you don't want to deform the wax). After wiping the plate I decided to do a relief roll with burnt umber. Here's the first print...


















For the second print, I added pthalo green and a little red oxide to the plate to get this...


















For the final print, I cleaned the plate and changed colors completely going with an intaglio inking of yellow ochre and carmine red, with surface rolls of burnt umber and red oxide.


I really enjoyed this process and I want to do more work with it. I started a second plate in class but it is not ready for primetime yet...more later...