Hey there! I've been busy since I last posted - did some art walks at a couple places and I did my first outdoor art fair. And then I picked up something new and was just doing test pieces and experiments but at long last I have something done that I'm happy with.
I've wanted to try encaustic for ages but I was always concerned about how fragile the finished pieces are. I happened to pick up a book on a 50% off table at the local craft store and it reminded me how much I love the look of it. So sheer yearning won out over practicality and I got the book. I had to get a few supplies like an electric griddle and so on but it's not too terribly difficult to get started.
It took a while to figure out how to incorporate the collage bits and the image transfers. I came up with a few things I liked - there's lines drawn straight onto the panel in colored pencil because regular pencil smudged when I put the first layer of wax on. Guess how I found out... You can see a bit of the smudges still on the top piece. I picked up all the graphite on the second one and redrew in colored pencil and it stayed put.
There's watercolored and colored-penciled pieces of cut paper and then obviously image transfers. Surprisingly I can use the same transfer paper as before - just burnish it on and then apply heat once it's down. It's iron-on for everything else but it comes off without heat onto the wax and then smooths out nicely under the heat gun.
The triangles are graphite pencil transfers onto the top of the wax. They burnish on nicely and then set with a little zap from the heat gun. The top piece is 8x10" and the bottom is 8x8".
It's super fun and so far I'm pretty excited about having collages that are flat but with lots of depth. And I'm glad to have something finished finally that I can post here! I definitely feel like a mad scientist :)
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