I lately stumbled back into playing with wax resist techniques in my daily drawings. It’s been a while since I dug into this, and my daily drawings are giving me a chance to do some more focused exploration into how to get the results that I like. I’m still a ways from satisfied, but the journey is great fun. I took some snapshots as I went along on one of my recent drawings to give an idea of my process.

The first layer is colors ( I think water colors in this case) and lines drawn with hard (8h) pencil. A layer of Neocolor I crayons (the non-water-soluble kind) and/or oil pastels goes over that.

That gets covered with ink. In some drawings I use watercolor instead.

The ink gets scraped off after it’s dry. This is the “uncovering buried treasure” part of the drawing that I enjoy so much. Sorry about the unfocused photo!

In this drawing I wanted to play with scratchboard techniques, so I went back over some parts with more ink.

Here is about where I ended up.

One side effect of my recent run of resists is that I got time to finish up a drawing I started last summer, while waiting for the ink to dry. I was looking at “zen tangles” with my sister-in-law, and drew a couple  of line drawings to fill in with patterns. More dancing princesses!

…..And… here are the drawings I posted in the past week all in a bunch: