Iron & Stylus

The Starter Set contains the Painting Iron along with waxes, card, scriber and an introduciton (multi-lingual). There are a load of step by step pages in the old encaustic art archive section  here – well worth a look! There are also videos on the video page that will visually explain how to use these tools.

Basically, the iron is used to melt and spread the wax colours on the surface (for hobby art this is usually white painting card). There are four main effects that the iron produces naturally – smoothing, lifting (organic structure pattern), edge work (thin lines) and the point of the iron (fine spots and small squiggles  / birds, flowers, etc.) The iron cam also be set up in an inverted mode to work as a mini-hotplate.

The Stylus is a graphics tool which allows addition of further wax colour, blending, line and spot making, shading, drawing and over-colouring, mixing of colours and much more. There are different interchangeable heads that fit the Stylus. These allow alternative mark types, etc.

For single temperature Stylus unit s a heat / power control plug can be very useful for holding a lower stable temperature when working in finer lines and for sharper details.