Three steps: beeswax and pigment melted on a warm palette, painted warm and fast with a heated tool on a wood panel, then cooled so the wax sets hard.

Concept · Paint and Its Surface

Encaustic

Encaustic binds pigment in beeswax; the name is Greek for "burnt in".

The wax must be kept warm to brush, so painters worked quickly and went over the surface with heated tools. Some wax paint may have been worked without heat; the sources disagree.

  • Around 1,000 painted portraits survive from mummies of Roman Egypt, mostly from about the 1st to 3rd centuries CE; some are in glue tempera rather than wax.
  • These thin wooden panels survived because Egypt's climate is so dry.

See

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