Every time I see beeswax collages in the art magazines, it looks really fabulous. Every time I try to replicate it, the results are messy and frustrating. I think it doesn’t help that I’m lacking the correct tools.  I use a heat gun and a ceramic dish (I learned not to use metal!) instead of a variable temp crock pot.

The effect I wanted to repliate was that of an etching, with very fine lines, and I wanted it whimsically unrealistic.  I wanted something like amonster in the background, so I drew one as poorly as I could using an 005 fine line marker.  You can still see the oval of the monster’s face.

I melted white beeswax and started layering it on.  This is messy, messy, messy.  As soon as it touches the paper, it solidifies, and yet when I use the heat gun directly on the paper, it soaks in making the watercolor paper look somewhat translucent.  I smeared it and smoothed it as best I could using a tiny palette knife that I’d bought for chinapainting.

Once that was done, I scratched the surface all over with a scraffito tool that’s very sharp.  This, surely, would give me the fine lines I wanted.  After that, I painted the whole thing with India ink, then wiped it off.  Um, not quite what I was looking for.  My assumption was that the ink would seep through where I’d scratched the wax away, soaking into the paper while resisting off the wax.  Instead, the ink stains the beeswax just fine.

A second problem emerged when I tried to attach the birds.  I’d cut them out of a chocolate wrapper I saved, and needed to attach them, but I presumed that nothing would stick well to wax except wax itself, so I got out my heat gun and another couple blobs of beeswax.  Naturally, the wax solidified as soon as I took it out of the ceramic vessel, so that the birds wouldn’t stick.  Eventually I got frustrated and just put the heat gun directly on the piece.  This made the ink blister off the melted wax, creating white blobs.  Finally I got the birds to stick, but one of them didn’t stand out well against the gray background, so I outlined it with ink, smearing it around the edges for a halo.

The only thing that went right with this is the photography.  On the premise that you can’t possibly have too much light when photographing art, I decided to just take it outside and shoot it under the noon sun.    I had to adjust the gamma downward in the editing, but except for that, I think I’ve hit upon a very successful, easy method of photographing 2D art. After all, if there’s one thing we have plenty of in Arizona, it’s sun. 

This was a learning experience.

Once again I started with watercolor paper, and wrote on it with a calligraphy dip pen. I wrote “There were facts about ravens she didn’t want the others to know.”  Once again it became quickly apparent that plain writing on a white background is BORING.  When I’d finished with the paint washes and tissue paper layers, the writing was completly obscured. 

I’d added bits of other papers too, in keeping with the color theme.  One is the washi with stars, one is he striped handmade paper, and one is the vintage domino ad.  I saw something  in a magazine where there were stripes of pretty paper arching over a box. I painted an arched rectangle with gesso, then looked for papers. The paper I had didn’t look right.

So, instead, I outlined the box with blue oil pastel.  Suddenly the inside looked dull, so I drew inside it with the red oil pastel.  Oil pastels look a lot like crayon, but you can smear it a little.  Smearing it helped. A little. I tried to draw outlines with sharpies and ended up ruining two sharpies.  Sharpies do not like to draw on an oily surface.

I used a scraffito tool to scratch branches in the center of the rectangle, and a small figure in the transom arch.  Then I painted on the gesso with India ink and wiped it off.  That did not quite have the effect I had hoped for.  I was going to gesso a bird outline so I could paint it in with acrylic later, but once I’d painted the white bird I decided that was okay.

The writing at the top of the arch, in my opinion, was a disaster.  First of all, I misquoted myself.  Secondly, despite being afraid of ruining another sharpie, no other pen writes well on gesso. Thirdly, my lettering was terrible.

But the purpose of this project is not to create a series of masterpieces, it’s to practice and get better at mixed media.

Good news, camera tripods can hold spotlights too, which is good, because you apparently want a spot that is some distance away from the piece so as to avoid glare. I’m still not 100% happy with these photos.  Bad news, the spotlight clamp has a tendency to scratch the top of the tripod.  I have a plan for a better design, but it involves some things which may or may not exist at the hardware store.

I have been wanting to embark on a collage project. That is to say, I want to start practicing in earnest to become a better mixed media artist.  I had a theme in mind: 99 Ravens.  I like pictures with ravens, after all, so why not do a series of mixed media with that as the subject?  But 99 might be too many.  The parameters of the project itself might be a learning experience.

But first things first.  I had one pair of pages left in my art journal that my sister and I started a couple of years ago.  I ended up only using part of the pair of collage pieces that I made for that, and this is one of them.  I have a notebook of black paper, and I had an idea that if I made the pieces of a small, consistent rectangular size, I might be able to mount them directly in the notebook and they would therefore be easier to photograph. 

The photography is a major part of any art project, and I get tired of hefting the kitchen table into the studio and unrolling the backdrop paper every time I want to photograph something. Not to mention the fact that two dimensional pieces are quite difficult to photograph. For me, anyway.

For the support, I used a piece of 9″ x 6″ 140lb cold press watercolor paper.  I started by writing something on the background with waterproof ink. The problem with this was that I didn’t really like what I had written.  It sounded pretty silly.  So I pasted over it with orange tissue paper using matte medium. 

I also pasted over it the print of the songbird on joss paper, which I’d made for an earlier project.  One thing I’ve discovered about water soluble block printing inks is that they are ALWAYS water soluble.  No matter how careful you are with the acrylic gel, you will smear some of the design. This is not always bad, as red was the third color of my palette.

I am usually loathe to use other people’s designs, but I’ll use scrapbooking paper as it is really designed for this purpose.  After I put on the piece of the domino ad, there wasn’t much cohesion, color wise, so I added the blue starry rice paper and a wash of orange paint.  Then I added a wash of blue paint.  It looked pretty much done at that point, so the only further touch-up was to scratch away some of the paint to highlight the form of the bird.

The rectangle as it is now is 4 1/2 x 6 1/2 inches.  My idea was to do them as art cards, except much larger.  The advantage of cropping them all to the same size is that I can change the focus, and I don’t have to worry so much about having perfect edges.  We’ll see how it goes.

Lesson I learned from this piece: I need to learn the knack of taking good photos of 2D art.