Reviewed by: Rachel A Hyde, MyShelf.com
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There is something irresistible about a craft that harkens back to kindergarten days and tends to free the child in people. Encaustic art pioneer (he invented the tools) Michael Bossom shows how you can paint on a number of different surfaces from wood to tissue paper and incorporate such things as embroidery and rubber stamps. If you have worked through some landscapes and abstracts and want to know where to go next, this is the book for you. Use your hairdryer to blast the wax into amazing patterns, iron your work onto fabric and make mosaics and collages - in short, have a blast.

This isn't a book for beginners but for those who have already mastered the basics. Though it skims through what a beginner needs to know, I felt that this part of the book could have been left out. The parts about making different patterns with the iron, showcasing some new tools and composing pictures were all very useful though and if you are one of those who thinks that encaustic art is all about fantasy landscapes then you will have a surprise. To this end I was most pleased as this is, in my own experience, what has put some people off the craft in the past and to see flowers, conventional landscapes and abstracts shows that it is indeed a craft for anybody who wants to paint. The medium can in fact be used like paint. Those who enjoy the currently popular hobbies of fabric arts and rubber stamping have cleverly been included in this book, too, so all in all this might draw a larger group of people into encaustic art's intoxicating web.