Wednesday, November 05, 2014

Wax On Wednesday - One

A big hello to everyone! This is the first post of hopefully many about Encaustic Wax work. I'll be doing posts about this on Wednesdays for a bit, and just want to share my progression, processes and work with you. I'm SUPER EXCITED about wax, and I can't wait to start doing classes with it.

Back in the Spring when I attended the Collins Group Show, I took a class with Purple Cows Wax. While I've worked with encaustic (to burn in) wax before, I've never used the colored pigmented waxes. I LOVED them! This is one of the pages I made in that class that got me hooked.

So I started experimenting myself a few weeks ago, and here is my first solo page on a piece of chipboard from Maya Road. It's kid looking, but it was fun to try many techniques on this. I'll be showing you these techniques in the coming weeks. I made all of these in one day in a few hours time.

Using the Purple Cows Melt Craft Iron to make shapes and turn them in flowers. I wish you could feel the smoothness and texture on this. They are so simplistic but these were a good lesson learning how the Melt Iron works and all the attachments it comes with.

I also have an Encaustic Painting Iron and after watching a zillion videos on Encaustic.tv, I've been learning how to use it and to make scenes. I started with this basic mountains and ocean scene. Notice I burnt a mark in the paper...OOPS!!! By the way, I used Tim Holtz's Disrtess Stamping Paper.

Learning to make skies, mountains, hills, and foliage was AWESOME!!! I shirked all my responsibilities on this day...no laundry, no cooking, no cleaning...only making scenes with hot wax!!! Here I used many techniques and then decided to use dropplets of hot wax as leaves on the tree I painted in with the wax.

More scenes...I guess I like trees...and this time I learned to make birds, and add more color mixtures.

I wanted this to be a masterpiece...WRONG!!! I wanted a gorgeous Autumn scene in the woods with Aspen trees and a path. I tried real hard, and it looked horrible, so I used my Ranger Heat Tool to melt the wax further and blend it all, and I got a more abstract look. I thought it looked so much better this way! It's just so cool what wax does! And, it's been around for thousands of years and used by the Masters. Hopefully soon, I can gain some mastery of it.
Day 1 was certainly fun and very addicting. Please join me for day 2 next week, and let me know what you think so far!

Supplies:


I hope your hands get creatively dirty soon!

17 comments:

  1. Wow, your pieces look as if you had a great time playing with the waxes! What I really like is how you show what a learning process it is. Watching some of the videos it always looks so easy, but I bet it is not. Never tried it myself, but am now getting very tempted!

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  2. Your wax pieces are beautiful. Is it difficult to do? I've always been curious about working with wax.

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  3. i love playing with wax.. it is meditative. love your pages and am so looking forward to next week's post!

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  4. Love this! Especially the OUi piece.

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  5. Cool! Have never played with wax. Fun to see the progression and experimentation. Thanks for sharing.

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  6. These are fabulous Anita, I love encaustics but I haven't done near enough of it.

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  7. Wow Anita, you certainly look like you had lots of fun making these! I have seen it on TV and they make it look so easy...... I guess it is not so easy but lots of fun and it is wonderful to see your experiments. The water and mountains look amazing... are you sure it it a burn and not a little boat? Thanks so much for sharing this with us! Anne xx

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  8. Fabulous work Anita...Amazing... Hugs May x x

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  9. Oh you are going to get so hooked on these my dear and I know you will be awesome with it. Do they still use that word? Oh I will . Thanks for sharing with us and keeping us up on the new. I use just the bees wax and didn't know they had new fangled colored. oxoxxoox

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  10. Wax is addicting, isn't it? We'll talk! Looks like you are having loads of fun experimenting. That's the best!

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  11. Anita I love what you did here! Beginner or not they are lovely! Evolving you are! Who knew and how cool....I personally love what you did thus far!!! Can't wait to see week two. Thanks for sharing.

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  12. You amaze me! Is there nothing you cannot do in the art world? I love the look of the wax, and would love to hold these in my hands. Looking forward to seeing more!

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  13. What a great start to your adventures with wax Anita! I love the looks you are achieving with it. Jenny x

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  14. Wow I love this beautiful wax pictures:) They are really stunning! Wonderful colours :)

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  15. I'm certainly tempted to have a go myself now Anita ! You make it look so easy from day one ! Sue C x

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