Fall Art Practices- Leaf Impressions.....

This week I’m still making seasonal art since I need to do this type of work while there are still leaves alive on the trees!  Unlike last week’s post where I was trying to make them very flat and take all the moisture out of them, for the cavo-rilievo technique (Italian for hollow relief), you need pliable sturdy leaves.  If they are too dry and brittle, it just won’t work.  


I love this process I've discovered for encaustic!  Although it took a bit of experimenting to find out exactly what temperature the wax needed to be, once I had that down it was so very fun to capture all the different types and shapes of leaves- and each and every vein!  

In very simple terms, you press a leaf- vein side down- into warm wax and burnish it in. You can paint around the edges of the leaf lightly with encaustic pain and fuse every lightly if you want a contrasting color in the background.  Carefully peel it up, and you've got an exact impression.  

For me, the fun comes in then rubbing oil paint into all the crevices to see the veins become more visible.  For this one, I used a turquoise blue which changed everything...I love that you can see some of the brushstrokes of the paint coming over, and a little bit of the background layers of color show up.     

  

Here's the whole batch of them and some detail shots....

Just after taking the impression ...

  

...and after the staining...

 

 

Happy Fall!