Encaustic collage

I have a stash of paper in my house that could keep me warm through three winters, if for some reason I decided to burn it.  Among this massive collection is a lot of patterned paper that I couldn’t live without once I saw it on the shelf, but for which I haven’t found a use because each page is too beautiful to cover with photos and embellishments for my scrapbooks.  Each one is really it’s own work of art, so how could I simply banish them to near oblivion by using them merely as background?

Luckily, I have found another use for my favorite scrapbooking paper.  I’ll use them in my encasutic paintings.

In this instance, the paper I used was from Bo Bunny’s Timepiece collection.  I cannot tell you how much I love Bo Bunny’s paper collections.  Every time I head to Archiver’s I make a beeline for Bo Bunny’s paper section.  Basic Grey has some really good lines, too.

Since I was using a piece of paper to cover my entire wood board, I glued it down to the board first, rather than use wax.  It makes it much smoother- you don’t have to worry about bubbles or waves.  I added a layer of clear wax once I had let the glue dry for 20 or so minutes.  While the wax was still warm, I added a transparency to the right side.  This is the map you see under the wax.  I had thought that adding a transparency was going to be tough, but it was actually much easier than adding the rice paper phrase.  Once again, I had such difficulty getting the edges of the paper to stay under the wax.  I think in my future pieces, I’m either going to have to accept the edges poking out of the wax a little, or put up with a little roughness in the wax that comes from not overly heating it so the paper doesn’t “float” to the top.  We’ll see…. maybe with a little practice, I can figure out how to do both.

The last element I added were the keys.  I pushed them down into the wax where I wanted them, and simply added some layers over them.

I had time to work on one more piece last night.  More experiments with paper.  I found with this one, that the direction of your brushstrokes matter.  I was originally only brushing my wax on in one direction- from left to right across my paper.  Hence, the right side of the paper stayed flat, while the left side was lifted much farther above the wax.  I found that if I started my strokes in the middle of the paper and brushed out in all directions, it is much easier to get the paper to stay flat.

One other tip before you start with encaustic collage- be careful about the back of the paper you use.  Paper will soak up the wax and become much more transparent than before.  This worked just fine for my first Bo Bunny piece, but I didn’t like it so much with the paper text I used on my second piece.  I’m a little bugged that you can see the words on the back side of the paper.  So be careful that the back of your paper won’t irritate you or ruin your piece when it suddenly becomes visible.