Ever since I bought
Claudine Hellmuth's Beeswax Collage DVD last year I have been itching to try out her techniques. Yesterday I was finally able to spend some real time doing just that. Instead of starting with a blank canvas or wooden board for a substrate, I used a canvas that I had done some collaging a few years back. It looked like this:
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| This is a combination of collage papers, acrylics, and oil pastels. |
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| Just one layer of natural beeswax makes quite a change in color. |
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| I used a wooden stylus to incise lines on top of the lines that already existed on the collage and then "scrubbed" some brown oil paint into them. |
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| I used several paper towels to buff off the excess paint. This shows some areas that have and have not been buffed. |
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The finished effect. I am really pleased with the way the paint settled into the pitted areas in the wax. Obviously, I didn't have a very smooth base layer of wax down, but that's ok. I'm still learning!
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The very cool thing about working with wax or encaustic medium is that it is very forgiving. You can always reheat the areas you don't like and start over. I need to do more research to learn what types of materials can be layered together and in what order. I do know that you have to use only oil-based products when working with wax, although this piece that I've shown had acrylics as part of the substrate so....I'm not sure. Anyway, I consider my first attempt at beeswax collage a success and I'll continue to play with it.
On a different note...look who greeted me at my studio door this morning. Not to fear. It was a harmless yellow rat snake, but still, it made me a little nervous. I hope he likes lizards! There's more of those in our yard than anything.
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