The Pysanka Process

In case anyone doesn't know and is interested how Ukrainian Easter eggs are created, these photos of my latest creation more or less show the process. The top photo shows the egg after being almost entirely covered in melted beeswax. In order to "draw" on the egg, you cover up any areas you want to remain a colour with a stylus filled with melted wax before dying the egg the next darker color. This preserves that portion of the egg from being died any further. You continue adding wax to the egg until you reach your final colour.

In this case, the egg had wax applied on white, and then was died and had wax applied on light yellow, dark yellow, orange, blue and red before being dipped in black. Wax didn't need to be applied to the black areas, as it was the final colour. As you can see in the top photo, sometimes you can see the colours a bit through the wax, but other times, if the wax burns a bit, it goes on rather black, entirely covering up the colour underneath.

The final step is melting the wax off, which I do in the oven, and then wiping the egg clean of any wax to reveal the vibrant colours underneath. It's a pretty amazing moment. If you ever played around in that seldom used dark room/photo lab in your old high school, it's kinda like that moment when you dip the exposed photo paper in the developer fluid, and the image magically appears out of the whiteness.

On a final note, as we all know, colour is relative to the colours around them. I'm quite pleased with the results of this egg, except for the pinkish tone that is supposed to be orange. I swear, when the whole egg was died and sitting in front of me, it looked reddish-orange. But up against the dark yellow and scarlet red of the final egg, it turned out pinkish, which was not my intention! The dying process is always a bit of a guessing game, especially when you are trying to combine colours to create other colours that you're too poor to buy!