Immediately I was inspired and filled with energy to create. The original and unfinished box is pictured above. Actually it probably had been stained, but I painted it white, cut a piece of felt for the inside and created the collage/mixed media piece to go on the lid. I plan on giving it a glossy resin coat over the image when I have enough pieces to make mixing the resin worth it. I bought a bunch of these small boxes so you will probably be seeing more.
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Completely unrelated, check out this tutorial on Design Sponge for making a beautiful chandelier. I think I’ve admired similar ones in stores before, but now I think I must create one for myself.
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Have a good weekend!
For years I’ve been wanting to explore more into encaustic. I remember being jealous of my friend Bethany who took an encaustic class, or maybe it was a painting class, but they got to work in encaustic for part of it. I’ve always loved the dreamy quality encaustic pieces have from the layers and opacity of the beeswax. I played around with beeswax on my own before and used it over a few of my collage/mixed media mailart pieces, but I really didn’t know what I was doing and worried that it would just crack off the piece eventually.
Today I finally got the opportunity to officially learn more and experiment with encaustic at a workshop. I had such a good time. The finished piece is basically 2D, but you work in a 3D manner to get the results. You layer flat as well as dimensional items, and play with texture and surface in layer after layer of encaustic medium. It was so exciting and freeing to have to think in entirely different ways than I’m used to working.
Here are pictures of the pieces I created today. The top one was my first piece and the second one was more a last minute piece and I think I might work on it some more. At the workshop someone mentioned the idea of creating a series and displaying them all together, so that was the idea of the second piece. I’d like to make a third or fourth to go with these.
Here are a few good references for working in encaustic:
Book: The Encaustic Workshop by Patricia Baldwin Seggebruch
Video: Getting Started in Encaustic with Kathryn Bevier
Supplies: Apparently if you live in the Northern Illinois area the Blick store in Schaumberg has a variety of supplies, but they also seem to carry a bit online as well.
Just a couple collages I did recently. The left has a “postage stamp” I painted in watercolors, and the right one contains the CMYK color samples we printed at my work years ago and have provided miles and miles of material for my collage work.
Today for Thing-A-Day I finished a mix CD I’ve been working on, tweaking and refining for a long time. I burned the first copy and listened to it to make sure there were no skips and the music all flowed properly from song to song. I am still brainstorming for ideas on the album artwork. I sat down at my drawing table to begin working on the artwork when I remembered a post I saw earlier today.
I saw this tutorial post on iHanna’s blog about making fabric paper and it seemed like fun.
The first one I made I really liked, but then I wanted to “tint” it and added some acrylic paints and I wasn’t thrilled with the outcome. That is more than a light tint, wouldn’t you say? I wanted it to be light yellow with “barely there” touches of green and orange, and instead it became red and green. Go figure.
I had fun though, so I decided to do another one. This one (all the more “white” images above) I left alone. I chose more neutral colored paper bits and I think I might come back over it later with a very watered down wash of white.
What will I end up doing with these? Who knows, but I thought I might scan them in and do some digital work over it for the album artwork.
Today for my Thing-a-Day post I made this mixed media wearable art pendant. It’s your birthday and here’s confetti and the horse you’ve always wanted.
Robyn fun fact: I’ve never wanted a pony or a horse. I love animals, and I had my share of My Little Ponys when I was little, but I’ve never understood the whole wanting a horse thing. In fact this silhouette is traced from a zebra. Now, zebras are animal I can understand. Having a pet zebra would be a fashionable accessory to me = I love black and white stripes.
If you’ve always yearned for a horse, well, now is your chance. I’ve listed this pendant in my Etsy shop.
Today I worked on more pages in my mini book for my Thing-a-Day post.
Today was a very busy day. I have all these projects I’d like to do for Thing-a-Day but very little time to set aside for them. On top of that, the house is a mess, to-do lists a mile long and I have so many completed items that I’d like to photograph and add to my shop, but no daylight in which to photograph in.
A while ago I did a post where I listed a bunch of cool things that I had received recently and I completely forgot to mention this book. Today I finally broke it out and used it for my thing-a-day.
In December my sister and I went to the One-of-a-Kind show in Chicago where I purchased the above book. It’s a beautiful green leather covered, mini handbound/stitched book with an assortment of encyclopedia pages mixed with quality drawing papers. I’m in love with the book from GreenTrikePress. Check out her shop, seriously, her books are gorgeous and amazingly constructed. When my sister saw these books she said to me “here is a seller after your own heart”. I was beyond thrilled because I had actually been working on making more books like this. I just love that the pages are filled with a variety of pages. I’ve decided to fill the pages with collage and mixed media work.
Here is the first page, that I did today.
Day four from Thing-a-Day.
Today I did these 4 quick collages, in my sketchbook, which will be used later for painting references.
-Robyn
My previous Thing-a-day 2010 posts: Day One, Day Two, Day Three,
If you’re anything like me you could use any extra push you can get…including this lovely reminder to GET TO IT!
There are lots and lots of layers on this piece. Mulitiple layers of acrylic (for the crackle background effect) and then layers of collage paper. I also used my favorite, chalkboard paint, on this piece. The message has been fixed, so no worry about it smudging away.
Own original artwork, this piece is available in my etsy shop.
I’m feeling a bit blue myself today. Not sad, just under the weather. I was still able to complete today’s piece, but I think I will take a nap next.
First, a couple quick links:
I found this wonderful site today. I guess it’s exactly what I’ve been looking for, for so long without knowing it. It’s called Gives Me Hope. It’s a site filled with short entries that users have submitted. Each item is something that has given the writer hope. Beware, if you are an emotional person, it will make you cry. While I was reading, I kept gasping (something a friend has nicknamed “icewater” because it sounds like someone just dumped icewater down my back). Matt would ask me what it said and I wouldn’t be able to read it without my voice cracking and my eyes tearing.
The next thing is something I discovered from a flickr/twitter contact. I noticed the other day that Brenna was posting daily creations as well, only, she is participating in a larger project NAARMAMO apparently it is National Art Making Month. Huh, who knew? Must just be in my veins.
