New Encaustic Pieces

I've been playing with Daniel Smith's new Watercolor Grounds. It's much like a gesso that you can paint on any surface, but unlike gesso, it allows you to play with watercolor on almost any surface, acting as a sort of "paint-on" watercolor paper. You can use it to paint over a spot in your watercolor where you've made a mistake and try again (although I could tell where the original paper was and where the ground was). But even better, you can paint it on ANY surface (read metal, stone, wood, canvas, etc...) and then complete a watercolor over the top.

I've been using Golden's Absorbant Grounds with some success to complete watercolor on board so that it can be used under wax, but it never quite looked like a watercolor and I had to plump up the color with watersoluble crayons. But this LOOKS like watercolor when done. The above is just a simple demo piece of a summer tanager that I did not spend a lot of time on because I wanted to play with it in my encaustic class I taught last week.

And sure enough, the wax went right over the top of the painting without any problem. Oh boy, gotta think of the possibilities here!!...

The second piece is a small 4" by 4" encaustic over birch plywood using oil sticks and collage. Just a bit of fun to see what I could do with the oil sticks...