Cocoa Butter Painting

I learned recently that cocoa butter makes an excellent medium to paint with: it dries really fast, and has a really nice finish to it, which definitely makes it better/easier to work with than alcohol. So I started playing around with it and mixing it with various dusts and colors...

The only problem is that cocoa butter is a lot harder to find. I thought going to the health food store would be an easy errand to run, but I searched that store high and low for cocoa butter. I found literally every other kind of butter: almond, peanut butter, fake-peanut-butter-but-really-some-kind-of-soy-product, coconut, cashew, kale... (ok, I didn't really find kale butter, but I'm sure it was there. Somewhere.)

I found cocoa nibs, and cocoa powder, and organic free-range non-genetically modified gluten free vegan cocoa, but still no cocoa butter.

Until I went to the beauty and cosmetics section. And nestled in between the essential oils and body scrubs, was a row of various lotions like jojoba butter and... cocoa butter. As a moisturizer?! Yep. But the bottle says it's food grade 100% cocoa butter, so I bought it. Here goes nothing, right?

It's a little tricky to work with, because you need to warm it up first, and it's all this giant solid block that you kind of have to scrape out with a spoon. But once you get it to the right consistency, it is a dream to work with. Like butter. ;)

I remember wanted to take a cocoa butter painting classes at the one of the ICES events, and I really hope I'm able to attend something like that one day, because I do think the applications of this particular technique are limitless....

Plus, my whole apartment smells like chocolate right now :)