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 took a stained glass class at a local shop, and this is what I created.  I’d never done stained glass before, though always figured I’d try my hand at it some day.  I have a picture window that really cries out for a large stained glass panel. Of course I have to make it myself, so I enrolled in a class to teach me how.

I have to say, it’s not what I expected.  I knew it would take some precision, but I didn’t realize it would take that much precision.  I knew it would be dangerous, but I didn’t expect to cut myself that badly or expose myself to that much lead.  (And stained glass is very pretty, but it can also slip easily into tawdry or dated if you’re not careful.)  It requires a lot of being precise, and a lot of careful attention to detail, and not a lot of creative expression: it’s more like woodworking than painting.  So I don’t know how much of this I’m going to do.

The main trouble with working in stained glass, besides the health risks, is that it’s terribly expensive.  There are a gazillion tools that you need, and a lot more that make things much easier.  I got some of the tools from Jane, but there were still other supplies that I had to buy. If I’m going to do more, there are even more tools that I’m lacking.  I also learned that the copper foil method (I do have copper foil) is more difficult (I don’t have a grinder to make things perfect if I screw up) and more expensive (uses a lot more solder.)  The leaded came method is more forgiving, but you have to work with lead, you need tools I don’t have, and putting the putty in afterwards is terribly messy.  The design I want for my picture window is probably going to take both.

I guess the moral of this story is that if you’re ever at an art show, and you see a stained glass panel that you like, buy it. It’s probably underpriced.

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.

Here’s another tile from my low-fire 2007 collection.  Another fact: Instead of rolling out the slabs, I pounded them with a wooden mallet, flattened on one side, that I got at a workshop by Junya Shao and Xiaoping Luo at the Vihel center in Tempe.  I find that if you pound the clay flat rather than rolling it, you get a nice density and less warpage.

This isn’t a very good photo, but it’s one from my old site that I saved for when I didn’t have anything new to post.  I’m working on two projects right now, a stained glass window panel, and a large mural.  I will post photos of them when they’re done.

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.

I got a book called ‘Creating Personal Shrines’ by Carol Owen after Jane Cheek showed it to me.  (Jane and I tend to inspire each other.)  The focus of Carol Owen’s book was creating memory boxes based around family ancestors.  Like most contemporary collage, her work is heavy on vintage photos and “ephemera”.  Not my thing, but she includes patterns and instructions for creating the boxes.  It’s quite time consuming, in that you have to paint foam core board on both sides with acrylic medium, and after it’s dried, you have to wrap it in rice paper.  I tried newsprint, as it’s about the same weight, but unfortunately you can’t use cheaper paper in this and expect the same results.  You can’t see it in the photo, but the blue paint made the newsprint wrinkle.

Unlike most pieces, this was inspired by the novel I’m writing right now (Mulberry Wands).  In this novel, owls feature predominantly, so I’ve been thinking about them.   I started by painting the back of the main box blue, and I printed stars on it with a commercially purchased foam stamp set.  I also painted the inside of the roof of the box (though as you can see in the photo, I ended up not attaching it.)

For the main box, I painted two pictures of owls in watercolor on 140lb cold pressed paper.  The branches are from our tangerine tree, which has been having a few rough years and has plenty of dead wood to spare.  Once I put the branches in, I chose the owl picture which worked better.  Lucky for me, the original size of the painting was suitable, so I didn’t have to print out a copy, I was able to use the original.

Next, I covered the lower box with the aubergine metallic paper, and I painted the inside flat black.  Soon after that, I decided I wanted to put a glass sheet in front of the box, like a specimen display.  (For anyone trying this at home, use a real glass cutter, not an oblong piece of tungsten carbide, especially if you’re going to wrap it in copper foil afterward.)  I knew that if I painted it with black or silver, it would have a nice mirrored effect, so I kept with the night theme and painted the waxing and waning moon. I made the moons small so that they wouldn’t obscure whatever was in the box.

I knew I wanted to incorporate the feather somehow.  I found this feather in my chicken coop, and it seemed to suit.  I was going to drape it across the top, but then there was space below that needed something.  At this point I decided to put it along the bottom, and find something else later to put on the roof.

So what to put in the box?  I was working with a deliberately limited color scheme, so I wanted something white or blue.  Something dark wouldn’t show up.  Owls are killers, and they’re silent, so there’s a sense of coldness.  Bones are also cold and silent, and I liked the creepy-yet-scientific idea of a bone.  This is a real cat bone. I’m pretty sure it’s the pelvis.  My daughter found the cat skeleton in our bushes, and she said I could have one of the bones.  I put it in the box and wedged the glass in front to keep it in.

She also said I could have the bones from her owl pellet at school, but hers were kind of gross, and I didn’t feel like cleaning mice ribs because they break so easily.  Jane helped me out here too, in that she gave me the contents of an owl pellet that had been sanitized.  I used one of the mouse skulls for another project (The Trickster, an art doll that’s still on www.cagedfaeries.com), so I had one left.  I rubbed it with silver and blue mica pigments, and set it experimentally on the roof.  It was too small.

Last night I started a stained glass class, and the instructor had us practice cutting circles in plain and bubbled glass.  When I cut this circle out, I realized I had a good use for it.  I ground the edges to make them smoother (or at least not sharp enough to slice).  The bubbled glass works as a halo to draw attention to the mouse skull.

This piece is just under twelve inches tall, and six inches wide.  At its widest, it’s three and a half inches.

This is my favorite book, and I almost considered keeping it rather than giving it away.  I wanted to do a cover that was almost entirely cloth, because I like the soft tactile feel of it.  I collaged it using a sewing machine, as I did with the glass fish book (not posted, as I lost the photos.)  From that project I learned that sewing machines don’t like to sew through clumps of ribbon.  To get around this, I layered tissue paper over the top of the cloth and ribbon, and when I was done, I tore the tissue paper off.  They do make special paper that will dissolve in water, so you don’t have to tear it off, but I have too many art supplies as it is.

I had already drilled holes in the coins to make a coin belt, but I decided not to use them because the edges were slightly sharp and would cut through thread if they were shaken frequently.  I sewed them with sturdy thread, so I think they will do just fine unless the book is put in someone’s belt and shimmied.  I sewed the beads on to add a little more texture, and to hold down some of the loose material.

The end papers are a handmade paper from Tibet that I bought at an import store when I was in Seattle a couple years ago.

The fimo embellishments were ones I made several months ago.  I rolled out a thin slab of translucent fimo, then pressed stamps into it.  After that I cut wedges and a center circle by using an apple corer.  After they were baked, I painted them gold.  The effect was rather more subtle than I liked, so I emphasized them with the maple leaf paper. 

The paper is tough (expensive) multi-print washi that I bought in Japan. I used some more for the endpapers, and for the strip on the back cover.  The gold stamp on the spine was one that was issued while I was in Japan as part of their “International Letter-Writing Week”.  I wrote a lot of letters (hundreds and hundreds) in the two years I was there, so I came to be very familiar with every stamp in the 130 yen denomination.