IEA Meeting and Demo

Last night we met at the studio of Andrea Benson and had a wonderful demo of how she builds up her dimensional figures in wax. Notice the clever clips she attaches to her tins of color so that she can lift up the cans and move them. Gotta get some. And the trim sealing iron - a new goody she got online that allows you to melt a line of wax directly on the substrate much as you would with a tjanting tool only letting you use hardened wax instead of melting it first.

Here is the new tool. I have a tacking iron and think I can do the same with that. It was a revelation to me to see the process in action.

We had a discussion of the fragility of frozen wax so Andrea froze a waxed board so we could do a drop test on it. We'd all heard a horror story of a shipment of encaustics that sat outside a gallery overnight and how all the wax had frozen and fallen off the boards. So Andrea dropped the waxed board 3 times in a very abusive manner.

Et viola! Only surface chipping on the corners where the board landed on the cement. Really, your work would never be subjected to this kind of abuse. We all felt better about the durability of our work after that demonstration.

Sorry, guys, candid camera - but I thought the walls of Andrea's studio were nice and you can see a few pieces of her work hanging. She is a huge inspiration to me and she teaches too so if you want to learn how she does her marvelous work you can contact her through her website and set up a date for a workshop in her studio. She even does individual tutoring.