Life and Death of a Painting

I photograph almost all of my work. I find that it is a good way of removing myself and seeing with a non-attached eye; then I can see the weak spots and make corrections. In the case of this painting, for some reason it never satisfied me and I kept reworking it.
 It became a pair of Hungarian dancers, that never quite worked because of the foreshortening. After about a year, I put the torch to it to wipe it off the face of the earth, only to find that the many heavy layers and the collage that was under all that wax was becoming something interesting. I sprayed water into the hot encaustic, added some charcoal for even more texture and scraped a lot .It became the final incarnation of the painting on the bottom of the page. It now hangs in the dining room

It doesn't look that bad to me now

Layering and scraping encasutic

The 4th online class will cover building layers of colors, scraping and cutting into the surface to reveal the underlying colors.

Encaustic sculpture

 I was inspired by dozens of cans of old flesh tone encasutic paint that I no longer use for my figurative paintings - I use a palette now, so I melted all the old wax together and build up a face. It is all encaustic. I used the torch very sparingly, mostly sealing the wax with heated tools. For the carving and shaping, I used clay tools.
I'm not sure I will do it again, but it was an interesting challenge.
What do you think?