Experimenting

I saw an encaustic painting where the artist used alcohol inks to represent pebbles beside the flowing blue wax river. It was beautiful and I wanted to learn how to do this. I couldn't find any videos or instructions on how to use alcohol inks with wax, so I had to experiment from scratch. I played with applying the inks to my canvases with cold wax and with melted wax. After ruining 2 canvases, I came up with this.

I didn't want to mess up another canvas playing with the hot wax and uncontrollable inks, so I decided to try adding inks to a dry canvas and then finish with an encaustic painting over it.

I still ruined canvases doing it this way because once the ink is on, there's no lifting or erasing it. My lesson learned from all this was to buy canvas paper to experiment with. I am currently playing with acrylics above and below the wax, but I haven't come up with anything worth showing yet.