Thursday, July 21, 2011

QA Fun Day at Val's

Today was the QA Study Group Day.   Since some of our members were at Quilting By the Lake - the rest of us went to Val's house (BEAUTIFUL house on Honeoye Lake) and played in the air conditioned comfort of her studio.   (I LUST after a studio like that).   Anyway, we did encaustic work with beeswax.   I wasn't going to go, (but Margaret invited me to ride) - or play,( but Julie coerced me) and I'm so glad they did.   Most of us spread melted beeswax on collages we made with pictures, fibers, papers etc.   Donna did beeswax on everything from an old sewing pattern to cheesecloth.   She got fantastic results.   Julie had large playing cards and so she and I made collages on these.

This is my first attempt!   I just went for bright colors - the beeswax puts sort of a plastic coating over everything.   Around the edges is melted yellow crayon for a semi-border effect.    The gold blobs here and there are fibrous papers. The beeswax is a little heavy in spots, so maybe it could be scraped off if I wanted to play more.   It's a very tropical picture.












My second attempt - looking forward to our next cruise.  The upper 1/3 is more fibrous papers.  The purple on the starfish and the blobs of green along the side are more melted crayon.    We drew on the bottom of a small iron with crayon, it melted immediately and then we ironed it onto the picture.   Sometimes it melted some beeswax already there - sometimes not.



What will I do with these?    No clue - they were "playtime".   But for now, I'm hanging them in my studio because I like the colors and the thoughts they project of island time!!!!

2 comments:

  1. I love the look of encaustic works. I want to know more! What kind of beeswax? what did you melt in?

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  2. Kathi, You're assuming I know about wax....what I can tell you is that it was beeswax and it was in "brick form". We melted it in a fondue pot. The most fun was drwing with drayons on the bottom of a small hot iron. They melted immediately and then we pressed them onto the base we created for "color blob" effect.

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