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!

Saturday, October 25, 2014

CC3C - Colored Crackle

Happy happy Saturday crafty candy lovers! HUH?  It's almost Halloween and I have the sweet stuff on the brain! I LOVE candy, and can't wait to raid the bags of a few kids I know!!! It's time for the fourteenth challenge in the new Compendium of Curiosities III Challenge!!! I can't believe we have already done that many!  Again and again, The Curiosity Crew and I absolutely love at all the entries for these challenge!!! I am always so inspired! Thank you for joining in on all the fun, and of course for all of the comments.
Challenge number fourteen is all about the yummy technique of  Colored Crackle!  I know I say it a lot, but this is a favorite of mine!!! I guess I love them all! I hope you can play along on this challenge so you can win some amazing fabulous prizes donated by the ever generous Tim and Mario, and this challenge's sponsor, The Funkie Junkie Boutique!!! Thank you sponsors for your generosity! You will have two weeks to complete this challenge and link it up to the CC3Challenge site, and you can carefully read all the rules here. Please take the time to visit every member of the Curiosity Crew (See below.) for not only some gorgeous layered inspiration, but for a chance to win some extra goodies!
Last year, I picked up a holiday magazine that had several Halloween projects in it, and I loved one in particular, which was altering pumps to create witches shoes. I dog eared the page, and put the magazine somewhere. SOMEWHERE is no where to be found now. Soooo, I played around with the way I thought these should go using a lot of goods from the Ranger arsenal, and I loved the result. While trying to decide on my decor for the shoes, I thought I'd google 'witches shoes' and came up with a ton of results on pinterest. I mean a ton! So much for trying to be original, but I hope you like my take! These could be used for candy, plants, cookies, and whatever else you'd like to put on a tray for Halloween. I think any holiday or special event would work for these too!
I used to go into an office and work, and had to dress the part. Now, I work at home, so it's flip flops and yoga pants for me,  so I'll just alter what I don't use anymore! BAHAHAHAHAHA! These shoes were perfect to alter. Lots of foil,Grunge paper dies, masking tape, and phone book paper went onto these. It was soooooooooooo much fun! Making pinatas would be a great job for me! AND...before you ask...they took me almost a week and a half to make, but oh so worth it!
Painting, glittering, and decorating them were so much fun! I loved using Tim's Colored Crackle technique on them as well...it was icing on this cake...not to mention lots of Distress Glitter!!!
Phone book paper is the greatest substrate...who knew?!! It took Distress Paint and Archival Ink so well! Lots of Stamper's Anonymous images were used in the making of the tray!
The Sizzix Cobwebs die really helped set the spooky tone on the tray.
 
 
They made my coffee table come to life, and notice there is no candy in them....nom nom nom!
Isn't this challenge perfect for your Halloween Art? I hope you join in on all the fun! Enjoy this week's candy!!!

Supplies:

I hope your hands get creatively dirty soon!