Bridgette Guerzon Mills | Comfort In Solitude, encaustic mixed media, 7×5 inches
Here is another small piece that I started during my encaustic mixed media workshop at Manor Mill. For this one, I had a piece of wood and I was showing how you can use the encaustic medium simply as an adhesive to attach your printed image onto your surface. My image was of a shrub that had some berries on it that I had printed on rice paper. When I fused the wax laden image, the wood grain really showed through. This was not a plain birch wood that I typically use, it was a scap piece of wood that had a really beautiful dark grain to it. It was left over from another project. So the darker wood really showed through this one delicate section of my printed image and took over it. Which, I said to my group, that’s kind of interesting, but not sure if I actually wanted that….
One of things I emphasize in my classes is to always have an attitude of what if and going with the flow. When you’re working in mixed media and hot wax and heat and sometimes fire, there’s a lot of things that happen unexpectedly. The key through putting in the hours is that you learn what you can control and what you can’t and finding the balance between the two. And also figuring out what to do with the things that happen that you didn’t want to happen.
When I got back to my studio, I continued on with the piece by adding additional layers of encaustic medium which obscured the dark wood coming through. You can still see it a bit, but it’s not dominating the piece anymore. Then I decided to add a transfer of a bird sitting in a tree on top. The transfer on top of the embedded image worked well and you can’t even really tell that it’s two different images.