Encaustic painting

The simplest encaustic medium could be made by adding pigments to wax, though recipes most commonly consist of beeswax and damar resin, potentially with other ingredients.

Also, heated metal tools, including spatulas, knives and scrapers, can be used to manipulate the medium after it has cooled onto the surface.

A completely unrelated type of "encaustic painting", not involving wax at all, is found in British ceramics, after Josiah Wedgwood devised and patented the technique in 1769.

[4] The wax encaustic painting technique was described by the Roman scholar Pliny the Elder in his Natural History from the 1st Century AD.

[10] In the 20th century, painter Fritz Faiss (1905–1981), a student of Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky at the Bauhaus, together with Dr. Hans Schmid, rediscovered the so-called Punic wax technique of encaustic painting.

[14] Although technically difficult to master, attractions of this medium for contemporary artists are its dimensional quality and luminous color.