Every time I see a new artistic technique or medium I have the urge to try it.  Such it is with encaustic, using colored wax.  I thought this would be a fun project to do with my children, becasue for the pigment we used crayons, and who doesn’t like crayons? 

Since we were experimenting, the way we decided to keep the wax hot was by putting it in a metal dish over some tealights.  For those of you playing the home game: don’t do this.  Not only does it not melt the wax or keep it liquid enough, but the metal dish gets burning hot.  Not only that, but we accidentally set the table on fire. (Good thing I had a spray bottle!) 

I’ve seen other collage artists advise using a quilting iron.  That sounds like an excellent tool, if I had one.  I do however, have a heat gun, and we enjoyed not just melting the wax, but watching it blow around with the puff of air from the gun.  Because the gun was the only thing that kept the wax melted, this was not a good three-person project.

The thing I love about encaustic with collage is the translucency of the glaze.  Images under the glaze look misty and faded.  You can also get fascinating textures. This was not a resounding success, but it was a nice start.  Next time I might try using my own images rather than cutouts of others’. 

I don’t think this will be my last experiment with encaustic, though it will be a while before I can make anything new, because my studio is a mess.

I’m so happy the mural is finally done, and I got the scaffold out of our foyer.  Painting the overglaze was the most difficult part of the entire process.  I was able to do some of it from the hall on the second floor, but then on the middle part I realized I needed a longer extension pole.  I tried from a ladder, but it was too wobbly.  Finally I got an extension pole from my parents, and by standing with one foot on the ladder and one foot on the piano, I was able to get the highest sections.  It wasn’t as smooth and clean as I had hoped; there are smears on the ceiling and some of the strokes are messier than I’d hoped.  Still, it’s unavoidable when you make the paint transparent (with glaze) that you’ll see some brush strokes.

The yellow leaves turned out nearly invisible–something I suspected might happen.  Not too much of a detriment.  Also, the glaze nearly made the crows disappear, so I rubbed them with a dry paper towel to get some of the glaze off and make them stand out more.  Except for the messiness near the ceiling, the mural turned out as I’d expected.  It has a rather gothic/halloween feel, I suppose, but for one month of the year that will be perfect.

Final note: the paint in the lower image is glossy because it’s still wet.

This is the project I’m currently working on.  It’s pushed my other projects to the side, so I’m in a hurry to finish it.  I had to take a break when we went on vacation, but now I’m home again and I can see the final stretch.  You can see updates of the progress here. 

Originally, this foyer was painted with flat white, like the rest of the house.  I think I’m a teensy bit agorophobic, because the darker and more closed in a space feels, the more I like it (to a certain extent.)  I did a similar mural in our old house, based on an article in a magazine.  I made two stamps for the leaves, one small and one large. In the old house, I used the small stamps, which were about three inches wide.  These leaves are a little over four inches.  To give a point of reference, the high window is four feet by four feet square.

I painted the tree trunks and stamped the leaves in June, and a friend suggested I ought to add crows (my favorite animal) to the mural, so I spent a few days sketching crows. Once I had the sketches to the right size, I glued the sketch paper onto thicker back paper, then cut it out so that I could trace around it easily.  I painted them completley black, with glossy house paint.  I debated leaving them that way (because I am not sure if the glaze will obscure the details or not), but in the end I decided that they needed more depth.  I mixed some white paint with the same glossy black and used the grey for highlights.  Posted is a detail of one of the crows.

The next stage is to paint over the entire mural with glaze+paint.  I’ve got a picture of the canvas I used to test out the glaze and paint ratios.  The glaze (and a little water) gives it translucency so that you’ll be able to see the image behind it.  It has enough color to tie the room together, and having a background color closer to the branch and leaf darkness will make the whole effect more subtle.  The next stage is really the part I’m most worried about, because for one, all the brush strokes will show and I don’t want it to look too busy/messy.  Also, I don’t want the color too pale, yet I don’t want the trees so subtle that you can’t tell they’re trees.  I’ll post pictures of the completed mural. 

I made this for a contest posted on one of Jeff Vandermeer’s blogs.  The contest instructions included a youtube video about how to make this.  I had to fold it five or six times before I got the hang of it.

Each page has a sketch of a crow on it, and the cover says “Crow” in gold ink.  The sheet of paper I used was six inches square, and the finished book is just over 1 1/4″ tall.

This shrine was inspired by the Mexican folk art shrines that honor Maria de Guadalupe and other Catholic saints.  They’re usually bedecked with candles and marigolds and photos. I love the look, but I wanted something different.

I started with an old deck of Morgan Greer tarot cards.  It took me a while to decide to use one of them, because as a rule I generally don’t like to use anyone’s art except my own. (Kind of limiting for a collage artist, I know.)  I chose this card because it was pretty, and colorful, and female, without being too serious or religious.  I painted the back of the box red, figuring that if I chose a color I liked, everything else would follow along.  I painted the inside of the box red too.

At this point, I hadn’t yet decided if I was goign to use the door on this shrine or on the owl shrine.  I assembled the main box part, and painted it with a copper acrylic paint.  I painted the roof piece copper as well.  Still no ideas, so I mixed some violet acrylic paint and rolled it out so I could use a rubber stamp and give the box some texture.  Better, but still a little bland. 

By now I’d gotten far enough on the owl shrine to know that the door wouldn’t work on that one, so I started thinking about how to make the door suit this one.  I just got some sheets of copper, and I was dying to try them out, so I embossed the backside of a copper sheet and then folded it over the front of the door.  It didn’t cover the edges very well, but I had a roll of adhesive copper foil tape that I bought for use with stained glass work. I used more of this tape to cover the linen strips that serve as door hinges.

To finish the door, I went through my beads to find something that looked good as a door handle, and I painted the inside violet to complement the texture.  I’d found the magenta silk flower, and decided that looked good in the peak of the attic part, so I glued the roof on and stuffed the flower in there.

Flowers were a good theme, so I rummaged around until I found the poppy seed heads.  I’d grown these poppies last year from a package of poppy seeds I bought for making cakes and then never used.  They have very large heads.  I painted them different shades of red and purple, and two of them I leafed with red-gold leaf.  To prop them up, I used the plastic casing from a box of 22 ammo. The plastic wasn’t very pretty, so I wrapped it in magenta joss paper.  A little hot glue to put everything in place, and voila!

This is nine inches tall, six inches wide, and two inches deep.