I urge you to try this art technique for yourself, as I believe it is more rewarding in the doing of it, than in the looking at it. It's because you look into it a lot more when you are discovering the patterns to reveal, and this tunes your vision to the medium, and worlds unfold and cascade before your eyes, that you just don't see otherwise.
I tend to err on the side of caution, and possibly leave more than could be best for the picture as a whole, knowing that I can always return and continue. So a lot of my pictures can still have more taken away to improve them, but once its been carved away, there is no way of putting it back. It is all getting rubbed out and there is no undo. This art form is the reverse of how art is normally created.
If you cannot make the base material yourself you can buy an unengraved picture which you can carve out yourself. I have pre-waxed pages (called starting blocks) for £20 each, so you can go straight into the carving, and discover the fascinating world of creating revealed art.
Below is the form that is used to lay down the carpet of wax which is then engraved away. The path is called the Penter and the white dot represents the moving of the crayon, and the whole thing is moved randomly across the page laying down an interwoven texture that forms the canvas to start with. This is how the starting blocks are produced.
Below I show the 2nd stage which involves carving out the wax with your finger nail.
It is a destructive process. A hundred works of art will be destroyed in the making of one. It is like evolution itself, which has lost countless beautiful species on its way in creating the beautiful species that there are today, and will continue forever in this beautiful way.
It can be agonizing to decide what bit to remove, as revealing something that is seen destroys something else that is also seen. Which one you choose creates the journey of the next bits to see and reveal or lose. You cannot bring it alive without killing so many alternatives. It is just like life, which kills to live.
This is just what happens when I’m left alone in a room with a box of crayons!
I do believe though, that I have found a new means of producing art from a medium not usually associated with it. I am the originator of it, but I believe that much better artists than I can take it further, and so I encourage anyone to copy this method and take their own path from it; it is a journey worth taking in its own right. I would only ask that you might make reference to the source of your art success'.
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My art is part of a much larger development project called Pentegraph, which extends the 2 dimensional technique into 3 dimensions. This creates a 4 dimensional art form performed with luminous objects in the dark.
My art and Pentegraph converge in Megak.