Rubber Stamps in Encaustic Wax Painting

Video Transcript

"JOHN VANDEBROOKE: This is John Vandebrooke and on behalf of Expert Village, I am inviting you to take a look at our series of intermediate stages of encaustic painting. Rubber stamps open up a whole new dimension with working with wax. One thing I like about it is there are some people that approach this and they go, "Oh, I can't draw. I'm not an artist." And I go, "Fantastic. Work with rubber stamps." And this is just a wonderful method of incorporating wax and rubber stamps. So, let's say we had a rubber stamp. Here, in this case, I've got three rubber stamps to create this picture here. Now, what was interesting about this time is that I took a rubber stamp of this lady and put her over here on the card stock right on the surface of the card stock. Then you always want when you have the rubber stamp to take your iron and coat the top of the surface with clear wax that just protects the image so that you can then add other wax on top of it. And since the wax is transparent, you can see through the wax and you'll see the pattern that you can then take your stylus into all this detail with the wax. In this case, I did two different surfaces. I took this side of the paper and I took an image of the rubber stamps, these two rubber stamps, and I stamped that on Kleenex. Then I laid the stamped Kleenex on this side that had wax underneath and I took the iron and I heated the top of the Kleenex until it sank into the wax. Then I took the iron with some wax and heat the top and the little details I did with the stylus. It just gave it two different surfaces and had an interesting look. And, so, this is what you can do with rubber stamps when you start exploring all the different ways you can use them."