Step by Step Beeswax Collage - I Am The Door

There is something soothing about scraps of vintage paper, a reminder perhaps that even when a person is long gone, a snippet of them remains behind in a letter they wrote or a book they owned. 

 

 I had a prepainted 9"x7" stretched canvas sitting around, I felt like doing a quick collage so I dug through a couple bins of paper & pulled out pieces in a mixture of sepia & beige.

 After I tore edges, arranged and re-arranged and glued down with matte gel medium. Some torn scrap of a mesh bag, vintage pattern tissue & a piece from a handwritten invoice c.1850...

A good start but nowhere near finished. I decide it needs circles. Lots of circles in a dark brown acrylic paint...and then in white. An easy way to make a paint circle? Dip a cup into the paint and press it onto the canvas. easy peasy!

 Taking the same dark brown, then the white and drybrushing along the edges and over the textures of the collage adds depth and helps to try the various papers together.

It's working...but there's a lack of focus, your eye bounces around the canvas without a place to rest. Usually I tend to use a vintage photo of a person or a collage of words as the focus but I wanted to try something different for this one. 

I rummaged around till I found this door. I think it should work but not like this....

After trimming the image inside & out, I glued it down just over the snippet of the New Testament page on the left.

I could have stopped there and had a perfectly acceptable (if a little boring) collage but I decided to kick it up a notch.

Out came a chunk of natural beeswax and my melting pot.

 

I had forgotten what a pleasure it is to to use beeswax in collages, between the warm honey scent to the tactile feel of sweeping melted beeswax over the paper to the depth & glow it gives to a collage.  

The finished collage below shows how the layer of beeswax just adds a richness to the collage, how the papers meld together and the paint is mellowed by the yellow/brown tinge of the natural beeswax.

It also smells AMAZING! :-)

 

 

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~brenda