After a month away from teaching workshops, I was a little fearful about starting off the new sessions with something I hadn’t done before, a class called Words and Wax. It was inspired by some of Nancy Crawford‘s beautiful Love and Gratitude encaustic series pieces.

Nancy Crawford, 4×4″, Even More Love and Gratitude

I wanted to emphasize the mark-making within the words, so I designed a four-layer process that involved ink, stencils, graphite and stamping as the initial approach,followed by the addition of beeswax, and incising into that. The results were wonderful, thoughtful, accidental but purposeful. Please see what the students did in the video below.

I’m happy to share with you the general outline of the class in case you want to play around with this idea. You can find the steps here.

Postscript:

Ironically, just as I was writing this post about words, I received some sad news about the death of an old friend and consummate man of words, Professor John Igo. John was a San Antonio educator, writer, artist, photographer, producer, and critic. He kept us all on the straight and narrow path with our word usage in his delightful radio program called Grammar Gripes.

John leaves a legacy that is wide and deep across the arts and letters community – he will be greatly missed.

John Igo

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