Totally Surprised I Could Paint with Wax

For this project I melted a bunch of green, yellow, purple, blue, and white oil pastels and used gloss to paint on a piece of bristol board with.  The dimensions are 9"x12". One thing I did successfully was find a good color scheme, which for this project was accented analogous.  My biggest problem while creating this piece was the dried pastel cracking on the paper, and because of this I had to keep reheating what was already on the paper to make sure it didn't come completely off.  First I created the back ground by taking a small iron and melting oil pastels directly onto the paper and swirling the greens and yellows together.  Then I traced the outline of the woman in pencil and melted the purple, white, and blue pastels on a hot plate.  I used a small brush to paint in the outlines of the woman, put a coat of gloss on top, then voilà!

So Encaustic Collage Wasn't as Bad as I Thought!

                                                             (Detail Photo)

(Full Photo)

Starting out I did not think I would like encaustic or collage, but in the end I had fun with this project.  I think that the rose creates a nice focal point and the red splashes and free-handed ink rose make a nice bridge from the background to the rose. For this project I coated the board with gesso and made my first layer newspaper. Then I covered it in clear encaustic wax and placed burnt clothes in various places and covered it in more clear wax.  I then sprayed it with matte fixative so I could add another layer of gesso and a layer of brown shoe polish.  Then I used red wax to add color and cream wax to create a box and ink to draw a rose and define the sections of the piece. A fabric rose covered in gloss went on top.  The dimensions are 9"x12".  One thing I did successfully was creating a good composition by having a shaded layer on the bottom, a medium layer in the middle, and a tinted layer at the top of the piece.   A problem I encountered was putting the layer of gesso over the wax on the top, which took several coatings of fixative, and making sure the rose didn't get bumped off, which took several layers of wax.