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JOHN VANDEBROOKE: My name is John Vandebrooke and on behalf of Expert Village, I want you
to take a look at beginning encaustic painting. Kleenex is really one of my best friends in
the wax painting field here because I found so many different ways to work with it. One
of the ways is what I call "painting with Kleenex," and what I do is I take a couple
plies of Kleenex and I embed wax into it. I just take some wax, and I'll melt the wax,
and just soak it into the Kleenex. And I usually will do a pad of black overlapped by green
overlapped by brown. And when you're doing this, you have to watch that when it sticks
to the pad, you lift it off quickly enough, so that you don't get stuck to the bottom.
Give yourself a clean sheet and then start painting with this. And what's fun about this
is that you can't see what you're doing. You have to paint blind. And what I like is the
end result has quite a beautiful Asian quality to it. So, let's just try to do a little mountain
picture and we won't worry about skies here. We're just going to see if we can get the
mountain effect. So, we'll lay the Kleenex down on the card, take the iron and start
pushing wax through the Kleenex and you have to push down kinda hard to get the wax. Now
you see, you can't see what you're doing, so this is what's fun about it. You're just
guessing of what you're getting. And every once and a while, you can come back here and
take a peek and see what you're getting and see how it's coming. It looks pretty good.
Let's see what we end up with. Okay, here we go. We've got the outline of the mountain.
Now, take your finger quick while the wax is warm and begin to smear the wax into little
patterns like this, and there you end up with something that I think looks very much like--almost
like sumi ink painting. Now, of course, I could have put a sky in first, but you don't
have to with wax. You could leave it this way and add a sky in with a different medium,
for instance. You could use watercolor washes, you could use--you could stain it with rubber
stamp dyes. There's just a lot of different things you could do with this, but this technique
is great to know that you could take a, for instance, make a big rock in the front of
your painting with this technique and get a rock that you can't get looked like in any
other way, except with the Kleenex. So, this is a really great one for you to play with.