Waxing Lyrical

Hello everyone and welcome, lovely to have your dropping in today!  I am sharing a piece which I made for the latest Paper Artsy Challenge Use some Wax

I was totally inspired by some of the super samples and links Leandra shared in her post and this was just the perfect excuse to go and have a play. There are several descriptions on how to use wax techniques and create encaustic art included in Leandra's post, and there are of course many more all over the internet. My piece was inspired by some of the techniques Sanda Reynolds uses in one of her online workshops. Leandra links to Sanda's site too, and strangely just a few days earlier I had decided to do one of Sanda's workshops, so it all came together just perfectly for me.

The substrate I used was just watercolour paper, - not very clever, as really to do this properly you need something stronger, like chip board or wood, but hey ho, I had this piece prepped and gessoed, so I just went with it. I started with a base of texture and crackle paste put on with a palette knife. I made some marks in the wet paste and then when it was dry played to my hearts content with various colours of acrylic paint and oil pastels, mostly Caran d'Ache Neo Colour ll and Penthel and a few Sennelier metallic colours. It was great to dig out some long unused and forgotten supplies from my stash.

Now I am lucky enough to own a Ranger Melt pot, so that made adding the wax pretty easy. There was even some wax still lurking in my project pan (honestly it must have been there for at least 5 years or so...). Anyway, everything was collaged using the melted wax. The eiffel tower above was the top layer of a scrap of a paper serviette.

The hearts (from a Finnabair stamp set) were stamped on tissue paper first, but in the end I decided they did not show up enough, so I stamped them again on scraps of paper, fussy cut them and then fused them onto my piece with another layer of wax.

The sentiment is from the same Finn stamp set, stamped on tissue and then fused. I love how the tissue just totally merges into the background with the help of the wax..

The text stamping in the background finally, was done right at the end on top of the wax, I used the Paper Artsy Hot Picks 1501 and Black Archival and used my heat gun to fuse it into the wax again. I was amazed how well that actually worked.
I had great fun with this and will definitely give it another go on a better substrate.... live and learn....

I'm going to add this to the Paper Artsy Challenge and also to the new challenge blog that was started recently by Linda Leadbetter and several others of the Curiosity Crew. It's called Creative Carte Blanche and the theme is anything goes as long as you use something you have not used before. Well I had never used oil pastels together with acrylic paint, so I hope that qualifies.

Thank you so much for visiting and see you next time.