My first attempts at encaustic...

...well actually the first few pictures that ended up half decent. The other 40 (in the bin now) were the iron and wax sticking to the paper or me stopping and starting trying to glide the iron and wax over the paper which would not happen try as I may. The wax ended up off the paper.

Okay, so apparently I am 'ironing' too hard on the paper. You have to lightly glide the iron and wax over the paper. Would it heck.

I tried the official encaustic paper/card. Still couldn't do it. Went to my back up plan of using 6x4 photo paper cos the proper option was too costly for my constant mistakes. You can get 50 sheets of 6x4 photo paper at the £1 shop. Whereas the encaustic card was about £9 with p&p or more for 100 sheets.

Tried watercolour paper. That's the one you can see top left. You can see where iron stopped and started. Watercolour paper absorbs the wax which is why you can't glide the iron. Top right and the rest are on photo paper.

By this time I am on You Tube watching every video going. The main English encaustic site was far too fast for me. It looked so easy but it wasn't. I couldn't get the iron to glide with the wax and neither would it go from one side of the paper to the other...sigh...

Then I came across a German site. I can't speak German and You Tube very kindly informed me there were no English subtitles.

I nearly turned it off because the first few minutes was the camera looking at a blank piece of paper and no action. I had to keep checking You Tube hadn't broken down. Then about 4 minutes in a hand appeared...yippee action at last...but then the blank piece of paper again...finally a hand and some wax crayons appeared and a household iron and a pice of paper. All the while the camera is fixed on the piece of paper. Anyway, this person worked very very slowly, did a different movement of the iron, and at last I was able to figure how to begin. So obviously I missed all the person said, but watching the way they moved the iron more slowly and different actions I began to figure it out for myself.

More German videos, again no subtitles in English, and I was beginning to get the hang of this encaustic art. And enjoying it. I had lunch and a siesta. But when I started again disaster struck. My electricity went off. So I checked the fuse board and the socket circuit had gone off. So flipped the switch and all was okay for a few minutes. Then electric went off again. The encaustic iron?

So I turned the electric back on and tried the encaustic iron in a different socket. Electric went off immediately. So rubbish iron, only lasted a few days, and it is going back.

But what do I do? I am in full swing now, just getting the hang of this encaustic lark and I don't have an encaustic iron. I think about my own iron, which I have never used in 14 years, it is still new. It it is a steam iron...all those holes underneath. You can't iron over wax with that. You need a flat polished soleplate.

So back to You Tube. I find some Russian videos on how to do encaustic art. I was learning from these. They were using household dry irons same as the German lady. Then...hang on...rewind that bit...hey, this Russian lady is actually using a steam iron (obviously with the steam function off), and it has all these holes in the soleplate. Well if she can do it and create these fantastic encaustic paintings then so can I!

Where was my iron though...finally found it...but there are a lot of big holes on the soleplate...I can at least try. So I do. Apart from my first attempt where I didn't glide it properly and it 'stuck' to the paper showing all these little round hole marks from the base of the iron, I got into the swing of it and it was perfect. It glided the wax over the photo paper beautifully. And the added advantage was that it is such a big soleplate, that you could do the gliding on of the wax in one fell swoop, or if you wanted to do a figure of eight movement it just kept going.

I thought it would be difficult to clean 'cos of the holes which would be holding the excess wax. But it was easy enough. A couple of pieces of kitchen towel and a bit of beeswax (from a candle...I got that from the German lady...she showed the iron looked clean after being wiped with the kitchen roll, then she waggled her finger at the camera, picked up a beeswax candle, ran it over the iron, then cleaned again with a piece of kitchen roll and a lot more dirt came off) and the holey soleplate of my steam iron was fine.

In many ways my large heavier iron was easier to handle than the small lightweight encaustic iron, and the best thing was the iron lead because with the encaustic iron I had to wrap the lead round my arm because it was a sideways one and kept getting in the way. With my large iron the lead goes straight upwards at the back and I don't have to think about the lead at all, it keeps itself out of the way.

The second pic down on the left side was done on ordinary black card (I would have used glossy if I'd had any). But it uses quite a bit of white.

Oh, by the way, I did get some proper encaustic waxes, but again, when I go into full play mode, none of this stuff is going to last me long. So I looked for children's wax crayons because they are cheap and I hoped they would work. This was before I had looked at You Tube and the Russian videos. They were using children's crayons...the same brand as I had bought!

So this is my pic a day for my challenge to myself of a pic every day in 2017.

And an entry for admirer's Silly Saturday challenge.