Oil and Cold Wax Classes Coming Up and Another Way to Use Cold Wax

I'll be teaching a 2-day class on oil and cold wax at Art and Soul Retreat in Virginia Beach, VA next Monday and Tuesday. It's not too late to sign up for this bold and playful workshop!

This video will give you a taste of what we'll do in this workshop. I will also be holding a workshop at my Portland Oregon studio on November 14 & 15! 

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I made this collage the other day and found ways to incorporate some of my favorite substances. I bought a bunch of mats ages ago at a discount art supply store. I made this and two other collages to fit into the pre-cut mats. I hadn't done this before and it was really fun. Sometimes built in limitations can lead to increased creativity! 

Anyway, the mats weren't very clean any more, so I painted them with Annie Sloan Chalk Paint. I love this paint and use it on furniture to transform old pieces into something wonderful. It worked really well on the mats. When the collage itself was dry, of course I gave it a nice layer of clear cold wax medium, letting the medium dry and then buffing. This is my favorite way to seal mixed media pieces.

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I'm happy to report that the oil/cw piece on stone paper that I shared in my last post became buckle-free after it dried!

Working on Terra Skin Stone Paper

Peñasco     Oil/Cold Wax on Stone Paper 10.5 x 7.5

 

If you've seen my new book or my blogs, you know that I create some cold wax and oil work on Arches Oil Paper and Terra Skin Stone Paper. Both kinds of paper have excellent qualities. I find the stone paper a bit trickier but love its smooth surface and how quickly pieces on stone paper dry compared to work on panel. A reader recently asked me about a problem with the stone paper buckling. This can happen and so we need to keep the layers of oil and cw few and thin. Even so, the piece above that I did a couple of days ago buckled quite a lot. Now that it has almost dried, the buckling is almost gone. Whew! I'm going to experiment with placing several big heavy books on it when it is completely dry to see if that helps make the piece buckle-free.

My reader was working on a large piece of stone paper while mine is quite small. I'm going to test out large and small pieces and see what happens. I'll let you know. I want to keep both kinds of delicious paper open as options!