Been working on this piece for a few days. Came together pretty quickly. What’s different about this piece is it’s a merging of the two main techniques I’ve been using for years, encaustic and oil painting. Using the two techniques actually isn’t new, I’ve been blending the two media for years, it’s the styles that I’ve been keeping separate. Oils painting is great for fine details, depth of field, rich layered color; it’s very specific. But encaustic, because of it’s physical properties, it’s usually less specific. It dries almost as soon as it hits the canvas, it’s thick, it’s textural, and to use it properly you have to re-melt it so it binds to the substrate and any other layers of encaustic wax that were already laid down. The re-melting makes it difficult to hold onto exact shapes, lines and forms, so encaustic frequently looks kind of blurry, dreamy, floaty. (There are ways around this if you want hard lines and shapes, but I’m not going to get into that, right now). So, what I did here was paint the detailed parts almost to completion in oil, blocked in the background, and then started working the encaustic over the oil base. The other reason I used encaustic is because it takes transfers very well. …transfers meaning, an image from a printer. The ink used in copiers and printers is essentially carbon in a plastic matrix, and if you rub it hard on encaustic, it sticks to it. The transfers are the next layer on this piece.