Encaustic Portrait

This 12 inch square piece was really an experimental artwork.
It is encaustic (wax) over oil paint.
Only 3 solid colours were used underneath, blue, red and pink, painted
with oil colour.
Over that I used wax with different pigments. A hot stylus was used to melt
the wax, a bit like a low power soldering iron.
The wax allows light to penetrate it a little before bouncing back out again,
giving a strange skin like quality. Scratching into the wax brought back the shocking red ground again.
Inspired by fayoum portraits I saw in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York,
which I visited a few years back.