Tuesday, May 29

100 Day Challenge: Day 6- Waxing Poetic


                Yesterday was day 6 of my challenge, and also Memorial Day. My boyfriend and I both had off, a rare occurrence for us. I got up and worked on my 11am chores before we decided to go on a long walk. We’ve already had some intense days of heat here and yesterday was no exception. I tried to set out early but we ended up leaving around 10. We walked about 40 minutes along back roads into town and took a rest at the local coffee shop. I stuck with iced green tea and John got a toasted coconut latte that sounded sugary but good until he ordered it hot. Then we walked home, of course, for a total of about 70-80 minutes of walking. Pretty good in the heat!
               
                Once we got home, I worked for a bit in my sketchbook and John worked on some encaustic painting. Encaustic is a type of art that uses hot wax and pigment as a medium. I’m sure you can buy wax that’s already colored but John is very picky about doing things the hard way, so he’d made his own encaustic medium using beeswax, damar crystals, and dry pigments. That whole process happened the other day while I was at work and involved a new griddle, skillet, muffin tins, and a pink leopard print hairdryer. Anyway, I was intrigued by the whole process and ended up spending an hour or so making a little painting. It was kind of hard to work with, but interesting. I had to take these blocks of colored wax, press them to the griddle to melt a bit to work with, and then paint quickly as the wax dried pretty fast. You can also heat areas with the hair dryer to fuse layers of wax together and cause the pigments to move around in a surprising, uncontrolled way. It was fun and I’d like to try it again, though we picked a terrible time to get into this since you have to have a hot griddle right next to you the whole time.



                Later we had hot dogs and corn on the cob and watermelon, and that was fun, but I liked the non-traditional part of our day, too.

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