Remember a couple of posts ago when I mentioned wanting to take the Let's get waxy! art class at collage on Alberta? Well that was today and I definitely got waxy! Myself and 8 other motivated ladies learned all the tricks to encaustic collage and bonus elements such as rubber stamping, gold leafing and image transfer.... on wax. For some reason it wasn't what I expected, I guess I thought it would be less collage and more painting, I'll have to do a little research on that.... Anyway, it's always beneficial to spend 6 hours being creative whatever the art. My main focus was on just that, allowing creativity without being hindered by the need to have a perfect piece at the end, a hard thing to do for a perfectionist. So here is how it went down:

First we started with some hardboard canvases, painted them black, then assembled a collage from a myriad of images. I tried to evoke an atmosphere of a vintage travel location, someplace warm with palm trees and dappled sunlight.

Then we coated the whole collage with beeswax several times with a natural hair bristle brush. Then the wax is fused on to the collage with a hot blower. Now the piece has an overall creamy patina which works with the vintage feel.

After that I added a photo transfer of an airplane to add to the travel theme. I also tried to sketch some alliums into the wax with a pointy tool then rub oil stick pigment into it with limited success. So I tried to layer over that with some white waxy dots created with a stencil. Along with a smattering of gold leaf to accentuate the glow of that corner palm tree and this is my final result:

Here's a couple of other ones that I did as well. The one with the sticky brown stuff on it actually has varnish that was set on fire and reacted with the colored wax. It kind of looks like someone dropped some sticky carmel on it, oh well, creative pursuits, right?