Thanks for your patience while I helped my little blondie patient.

So I jumped back into the studio and decided to do something completely out of the box – because you never learn anything unless you break things along the way.  Or at least make that attempt.

I’m happy to say, not only did I not break anything but barriers – I invented something NEW…and here she is:

This, my loves, is a 12″ x 12″ hybrid, gelli alcohol shots and encaustic medium, etc.  Try saying that three times, fast.

To start, I took a 12″ x 12″ Deco XL from ClearScraps… either one of these will work:

And I put two coats of Golden’s Digital Ground for Non-Porous Surfaces on and let it dry thoroughly between coats.  Note, I only pulled off the backing from ONE side of the acrylic, to protect the other side during my process, initially.

My initial reasoning behind using the ground is because it makes something ACRYLIC have the ability to accept inkjet printing.  So in my mind, it would give it enough tooth to accept encaustic medium. But once I had it on there – I thought, hey, I love layers! Let’s print something onto the surface first!

So I did.  I placed the 12″ x 12″ acrylic onto a 13″ x 19″ (Super B) carrier sheet, smack in the middle, and fed it through my printer.  This is what I printed onto the surface:

Then I sketched my girl onto the acrylic using a Sharpie.

And used the Gelli Alcohol Shots technique on the back side.  (Note, remove that other layer of protective backing).

I sketched my girl on the front, so I had flipped over this technique to the back, both to make sure the inkjet coexisted with my Copics as did my sketch.  It’s all about getting along…

Next, I lightly heated up the surface of my acrylic with my heat tool and applied a layer of encaustic medium over the top.  I then used a pottery scraping tool (hey, a pointed stick would work too) and scraped away the medium from the outer lines of her face.  I went back over those lines with a black china marker.

I fused the layers and applied a bit of gold encaustic paint for her hair.  Fused again and while still hot, used a Princeton Catalyst brush to create textured waves for her hair.

Once this all cooled, I went in with Pan Pastels to do some shading on the encaustic medium, around her face and in her hair.  I applied copper and turquoise Pan Pastels through a stencil on the open space to the side.  I dripped a bit of white encaustic paint (acrylic paint would work too, since you are done applying encaustic medium at this point, it’s safe to put it on top).  Then I used a Montana paint pen in black to write the quote.

This quote is really resonating with me today… isn’t it a great one?

It is so hard to capture how luminous this work is.  The light just shines through her.  I’m going to have to figure out a way to hang her that takes advantage of it – possibly mounting it to a second piece of acrylic with screw posts.

Here is a picture from the backside so it’s clear… 🙂