Encaustic Collage

The Sparrow's Nest retreat was great fun, many wonderful pieces of art were created and some who thought they were not artist's realized that they actually were. Huge kudo's to Sherri and Tracy, who worked incredibly hard to make that event the success that it was. My teaching portion was making encaustic collage pieces, I had so much fun with them that I came home and made some more! The technique is simple, you collage onto a hard surface, in this case I used panel board. Fortunately Gerry had been covering the inside of his shop walls with panel board and there were lots of end pieces left, he and our good friend Mike were kind enough to cut them into my desired sizes and now I have a huge stack for future encaustic projects.

After collaging you brush encaustic medium (refined beeswax already mixed with damar resin) over the collage and fuse the medium to meld the brush marks together. I put a thin layer of gel medium over the collage to prevent the paper from darkening too much. While the wax is still warm but not mushy you can make a toner transfer of an image of your choice. Finishing touches are buttons, rhinestones, glitter and foil tracings.

I have at least 40 more boards stacked up under the desk ready to be worked with so I foresee more of these coming in the future.

The final major home improvement project of the year has been completed, concreting in front of the shop, garage and pad where the camper sits. It was a major project, but looks great, Gerry says he can't wait to wash his cars on his nice new driveway instead of in the gravel and dirt. Behold the awesomeness of Gerry's New Manly Driveway.....

It is very nice not having all that dirt tracked into the garage and then into the house.

Felines are doing good, Dana had to go the V.E.T this morning to have her butt glands expressed, totally NOT fun. I told her the night before she was going in the Magic Box to the Special Kitty Spa for her Treatment, but she's not stupid and she knew darn well she was going in the Evil Kitty Carrier to the Bad Place, where the Not Nice Man with the Rubber Glove messes around with her Patootie. She was super ticked off when she got home, she kept hissing at me, her brother and imaginary things I could not see. There has been liberal application of cat treats to take the edge off.

Encaustic artwork

It's a glorious sunny Sunday here in Western Washington, the weather goddess kind of faked us out for while and sent some winter weather but the good stuff is back now. I finally finished my web design classes at the community college and have the software loaded up in the computer and am working my way through my huge manual. It is actually quite enjoyable, I love the "a-ha" moments when I do something right and it looks all purty. It will take a while before I have one designed for myself but I will get there.

ArtFest is just around the corner, the chatter on the Yahoo Group is reaching a fever pitch like it does every year. They have a gallery where you can display up to three of your pieces and I decided I might do some encaustic (wax) stuff. One of the classes I took last year at ArtFest was with the wonderful Judy Wise, a encaustic guru, the techniques I learned there along with the Encaustic Workshop book by Patricia Seggebruch  led me to these two pieces. Basically it is fusing specialty paper with encaustic medium (melted white beeswax and damar resin), adding layers of images, stickers, rub-ons and some texturing with oil paint, and more layers of medium. Finished touches were some gold foil detailing and addition of a micro-bead border on the blue piece. Great fun except the studio smelled like wax for a couple of days! Spousal Unit wanted to know what I was burning down.

The theme for ArtFest is Once Upon a Time so I am going to apply myself to making at least two pieces to take with that idea, perhaps something with fairies or dragons.

Last but not least I have to leave you with what seems to be my increasingly frequent cat pictures (Crazy Cat Ladies Unite!) but this was to cute not to share. Picture of Apollo is slightly blurry, I had to take it through the studio window, before he proceeded on to some other important thing, like chasing bugs.

The motto for this one is, "If you really don't have anything better to do, just sit and stare through the hole in the fence".