48 Birds #3: The trouble with beeswax

Every time I see beeswax collages in the art magazines, it looks really fabulous. Every time I try to replicate it, the results are messy and frustrating. I think it doesn’t help that I’m lacking the correct tools.  I use a heat gun and a ceramic dish (I learned not to use metal!) instead of a variable temp crock pot.

The effect I wanted to replicate was that of an etching, with very fine lines, and I wanted it whimsically unrealistic. I wanted something like a monster in the background, so I drew one as poorly as I could using an 005 fine line marker.  You can still see the oval of the monster’s face.

I melted white beeswax and started layering it on.  This is messy, messy, messy.  As soon as it touches the paper, it solidifies, and yet when I use the heat gun directly on the paper, it soaks in making the watercolor paper look somewhat translucent.  I smeared it and smoothed it as best I could using a tiny palette knife that I’d bought for china painting.

Once that was done, I scratched the surface all over with a scraffito tool that’s very sharp.  This, surely, would give me the fine lines I wanted.  After that, I painted the whole thing with India ink, then wiped it off.  Um, not quite what I was looking for.  My assumption was that the ink would seep through where I’d scratched the wax away, soaking into the paper while resisting off the wax.  Instead, the ink stains the beeswax just fine.

A second problem emerged when I tried to attach the birds.  I’d cut them out of a chocolate wrapper I saved, and needed to attach them, but I presumed that nothing would stick well to wax except wax itself, so I got out my heat gun and another couple blobs of beeswax.  Naturally, the wax solidified as soon as I took it out of the ceramic vessel, so that the birds wouldn’t stick.  Eventually I got frustrated and just put the heat gun directly on the piece.  This made the ink blister off the melted wax, creating white blobs.  Finally I got the birds to stick, but one of them didn’t stand out well against the gray background, so I outlined it with ink, smearing it around the edges for a halo.

The only thing that went right with this is the photography.  On the premise that you can’t possibly have too much light when photographing art, I decided to just take it outside and shoot it under the noon sun.  I had to adjust the gamma downward in the editing, but except for that, I think I’ve hit upon a very successful, easy method of photographing 2D art. After all, if there’s one thing we have plenty of in Arizona, it’s sun.