Encaustic painting

[Carlton Bach]

Have any of you folks ever done it? I'm thinking of goiving it a try to see how it works for shields, but I have no idea of the tewchnical challenges involved, and I don't want to shell out EUR 150 for those 'beginners' kits' they fleece upper class housewives with. Not unless there is no way around that, anyway.<br>
Som how do you keep the wax liquid? Hot water bath? Candles? Do you mix ready mixed colours or pigments? Can you ever get the brishes clean, or do you just use the cheapest kind and throw them away? Can you ever get anything involved in the process clean?<br>
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Thanks<br>
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Titus Flavius Artemidorus<br>
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PS: rawhide painting experiment directly, with casein paint, works well, but does b****-all for water reisistance. Haven't destruct-tested it yet. Gesso on rawhide sucks. I'm curious how encaustic would work. <p></p><i></i>

[Anonymous]

If you actually do encaustic painting on your scutum, please let us know how it goes. I recently asked the question of how the romans actually painted shields, and it comes down to one of three painting technologies: casein, encaustic, or tempera. No one has been able to definitely show which of these was actually used. <p></p><i></i>

[richsc]

You can get encaustic supplies from Sinopia in San Francisco. There are several book on Amazon; just search on encaustic. <p>Legio XX<br>
Caput dolet, pedes fetent, Iesum non amo<br>
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[marsvigilia]

According to Pliny, war ships were painted with encaustic paint and it was done with brushes. That might be a justification for painting the shields with brushes too rather than those trowal things. I have heard though that you need a seperate brush for each color. <p></p><i></i>