Oh my….what will I report from the Patricia Baldwin Seggebruch workshop held last week at the Encaustic Center in Richardson, TX (Dallas)? First of all, we had a fabulous time talking, painting and learning with a good friend from Mississippi, Cathy Hegman. Also, it is also wonderful meeting the artists you know already and the ones you don’t in a setting such as a workshop where you are all sharing your experiences/knowledge.
Trish is a delightful person. She demonstrated several times a day the way that she uses wax, collage, embossing, transferring images, etc. We then all set to try out all these techniques we may or may not have done in the past. We all learned a few things or or a lot of new things (depending on individual experience) to take home with us and interpret in our own work.
I’d never really been fortunate in transferring images before. It was better to actually see someone do this instead of reading the instructions. With encaustic I think it is easier since the method we used used water to remove the extraneous paper left on the board. It was so much better to not have to worry about washing off more than you intended with the wax being waterproof. I found that I had not been rubbing the back of the paper with the transfer near enough. Also, pouring water on and rubbing it off is a lot easier and less time consuming than using a mister……at least for me.We also used a laser or toner based transfer……and water. No solvents to have to go outside for or anything special other than that. Have your wax surface slightly warm, lay down your transfer image face down into the wax and rub and rub and rub with the back of a spoon, etc. Finally, can start pouring on small amounts of water and rubbing with your fingers until all the paper residue is gone and your image shows. If there is a little left, the next layer of clear medium with cause it to just disappear.
I did two pieces this way to try to reinforce this in my mind for the future. I have a lot of things I might want to photograph and use this method on. All in all, I probably did about 7-8 smallish pieces running from 8 x 10″ and down during the three day workshop. the two I’m showing here with the transfers are both 10 x 8″.
During the workshop, I also worked with using fabrics as collage elements along with other stuff you find around…threads, slightly 3-d stuff to embed. Whatever interests you to apply to your work. As a painter I tend to forget all these nifty little techniques most of the time and keep just painting. However, now and then I want to know how to get a certain look for special paintings…..OR how to incorporate elements I haven’t used much before.
The reason to take the workshop is that I’ve only taken a one day thing about 6 months after I started working with encaustic. I figured I might be making things harder on myself than I needed to so I was going to see if there were easier ways to do some of the things I was doing. Some like the transferring were good to show me a simpler way. Other things, looks like I’d been doing okay all along.
All of us need to get out once in a while and get together with other artists ……and maybe pick up a thing or two. That’s the great thing about workshops, you get to do it all.
Ditto! Well said! 🙂