This is a copy of a Fayum encaustic.

This copy is painted using the same technique as the Greek Icon painters who arrived in Egypt under it's Roman occupation, during the early Chrstian Era.

The so-called Fayoum portraits, more than 1,000 of them, are the largest body of ancient portable paintings to have survived. They are portraits, painted mostly on wood, of men, women and children, young and old, believed to have been painted in their lifetime, sometimes framed and displayed in the homes, and later sawn to fit just inside the sarcophagus where they were placed on top of the face within the mummy wrappings to preserve the memory of the deceased.

I painted this on a vey carefully prepared wooden support which was prepared and primed in the manner that the Greek artists of the time used.

You basicly use beeswax and get it into a iquid state and add pigments. This makes a superb painting medium and encaustic paintings are the oldest and best preserved paintings in the world. This is because the beeswax fosilises after about 10 years and is more flexible than oils when dry. So the surface doesn't crack or change in the ways that we expect oils to after several centuries.