waxing euphoric

Here's my second attempt at playing with wax.   This time I melted three pots of beeswax - I left one in it's natural state, but I added a cheap oil pastel to the other pots and melted it along with the wax for color.  Encaustic artists everywhere are cringing, I know, but it was a worthwhile experiment.

I made a very compelling mess, and it was SO MUCH FUN.

 I started by painting with the orange and blue wax directly onto canvas board.  I zapped it with the heat gun just a little bit to blend the edges of the color, then I coated a piece of marbled rice paper with plain beeswax and adhered it.  (That's the weird blue nebula in the lower left corner).  I then added a piece of wasp's nest.

Yes, wasp's nest.

So, hang on - I need to tell you a story.

A few years ago I met this really cool woman named Debbie.  She's an artist and puppeteer and all around fascinating person.  We met because she works with the open land foundation in the town where I work and I was planning some nature programming for my after school program in one of the local nature preserves.  We spent 3 glorious hours in the woods together, sharing our passion and wonder for the beauty of the natural world.

Here's a picture she took of me poking at a pile of coyote scat with a stick.

 ANYWAY - last week, I came to work one morning and there was this beautiful amazing piece of "paper" on my desk.  It was clearly a piece of a wasp's nest

only it has the most amazing colors in it.  Grey and brown and cream and moss green and yellow ochre.  There was a post it note from one of my employees saying "from the puppet lady".

Debbie had stopped by my office because she knew how much I'd like this and want to share it with the kids.  Here are some pictures that do not do justice to it's beauty

( I'm certain my staff thought this was the WEIRDEST thing ever.  This lady shows up unannounced to give a piece of a wasp's nest to their boss and she's positively GIDDY about it.)

Now back to the art.  The colors in this paper were so inspiring, I thought it would be cool to work some of it into the collage.

Sadly, once it was covered with beeswax, it ended up looking like a piece of burned bacon.  

Lessons learned.

(mmm....bacon....)

I added a thick layer of natural color beeswax on top of this whole mess and blew it around into puddles with the heat gun.   I colored with brown oil pastels and turned on the heat gun to melt them into the wax. I jammed some bottle caps into the hot wax to make the circles.  I found a spiral paper clip on my work table and made some impressions with it in the upper left corner and then embedded the actual clip into the lower right corner.  I sprayed the whole think with walnut ink to let the brown stain seep into the cracks in the wax and then wiped all the excess off the surface.  I declared it sufficiently mutilated and called it a day.

Overall it's a big muddy mess, but I'm oddly pleased with it.  

I'm already well into my next wax experiment.  If things go well I'll show it for paint party friday.