With its roots in Ancient Greece, encaustic is a wax-based painting medium, characterized by luminous colour and a lush service. This handbook reveals how to master this beautiful yet demanding medium. It discusses ways to achieve vibrant colour and create surfaces that look as light as a wash or as densely textured as impasto. The author demonstrates how to produce effects from abstract to figurative to minimal, and how to use encaustic techniques in their own art. The book includes examples of artwork from leading encaustic artists such as Jasper Johns, Arthur Dove and Nancy Graves.