House No. 123: Rooftops

House No. 123: Rooftops

encaustic on paper

18 in. x 12 in.
123/365; 05/03/11

I started to get more controlling about the encaustics, which is sort of funny considering that I was excited about them loosening up my hand. I wanted to push them though, so I started to crudely control the temperature with two pizza stones (one was heating in the oven while I worked on the other) and two cookie sheets cooled in the freezer.

By controlling the heating and cooling, I was able to solidify goops of wax where I wanted them (sort of) and cool the surface enough to get thick, chunky lines. See the black accents in these details for examples of that line work.

I re-melted portions, wiped them smooth with paper toweling, scratched into the wax with chopsticks and pieces of cardboard, spread the wax around and cooled it into dimensional surfaces, and melted colors together.

Above, you can see where I wiped off a lot of color and pooled it on top in the yellow and grey areas. Then I worked into the cooler wax with the black crayon to get harder edges with more contrast.

Different shades of brown and red made up these tile roof, above. I wiped the areas clear to layer the color and then cooled chunks of molten wax to create dimension and texture.

I used a lot of white in the above portion to make the windows look reflective and to create highlights. Different color tones and hues and layers of wax create shading and dimension, as seen in detail below.

Stylistic inspiration for today's house came largely from Egon Schiele. (A warning about following that Schiele link: a lot of his works are Not Safe for Work.)