Lightbox is risky..

Well that lightbox does technically work but seems way too much of fire hazard for me to use a lot.  I figured out a way to rig up my studio easel with the plexi off of that and a spring clamp to draw on the back of a photo to get the interesting things going on I’m trying to do… I back lit it with lights from the studio and also just looking at light in the dining room on the ceiling while I lay on the floor with easel hovering above me. Finally went to the studio since some of the color pencil marks were falling off… that blasted gravity…  I really am interested in this sort of thing since it lets me combine photography, illustration, drawing, and painting all in one interesting and bizzare process that gets very neat results, or I am hoping will get neat results. 😉

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Made a lightbox today! :)

Just made a light box today. Had several 11″x7″ hard board sheets that I was originally going to use to draw on or paint on. Still have many of those for that but 5 less now because they are now my new light box… amazing what duct tape, hard board, and an old light off of a broken drawing desk, and a sheet of old plexi glass from many years ago can do when used together. 😉

Ended up taking the sharp edge of one of my many chisels since I used it as a plexi-glass cutter. It worked well though and I have plenty of other chisels. Hopefully the 60w lamp won’t melt the plexi. As long as I don’t make my sessions using it super long I don’t think that’ll be a problem. If it is, plexi is easy to replace. I probably should be using glass instead of plexi but since I’m planning on using a lot of pointillism techniques that will require a lot of banging a pencil against it I figure plexi is better since it’ll hold up where glass would just break. Thinking about using crayon/color pencils on this and then using that as carbon paper sort of to transfer the image on to the boards as base layer/underpainting for the encaustic panels, burnishing the back of the paper as it lays on the encaustic, etc. I tried testing a little today with a transfer bit on my wood burner but that didn’t work at all since the heat was too hot and caused the wax to actually melt in to the paper, so got to do this cool on cool, no heat applied. In theory it should work, somewhat. Still not sure if the encaustic and color pencil waxes will merge/melt together well but in theory they should I think. I think wax pencils have a parraffin type wax in them. If it doesn’t work well I may have to use crayons/wax pencils instead of the color pencils. Not sure I like that idea though since I want pigment in this and most crayons have way more wax than pigment. Color pencils are more leaning the other way a bit.

I made the light box since I think it’ll be easier process of photo to paint surface transfer that will work better than the crazy poke holes in pictures technique and pounce afterwards that I was planning on using. Still may use that sometimes, but it’s a really non-drawing type of thing so I’m not sure it suits my style/technique so well.

encaustic

I’m over on http://encausticart.ning.com/ now as I’ve started to take up encaustic painting a little. Bought a wood burner yesterday to help out with that a bit. http://www.walnuthollow.com/23906creativeversa-tool.aspx Got it at Michaels. There’s a lot to it, but I think I love encaustic because it’s possible to do lots of layering, lots of reworking, and it has potential to be just as complex if not more so then oil painting but the stuff drys instantly so much can be done in a short amount of time.

I like the creative versa tool (link above) because it does the same that the enkaustikos pens do with the temperature control, but for about 1/3 the costs, and a lot less on shipping since we only live a block away from Michaels.

(I will probably get the Encaustikos Flow Pen someday though since I’ve not seen anything else like it on the market yet… but maybe not since it costs so much if you add in the cost of the temperature regulator — why don’t they just add the regulator to the pens like Walnut Hollow did with the versa tool?)