I love working with beeswax but it’s a little time consuming, a little messy and a little unpredictable but it’s fun so it’s worth it:)

 Here’s a little info on using beeswax. I use an old small crock pot for my beeswax, keep in mind you can’t ever use it for food (or anything else for that matter :)) ever again. Melting Pots work too but you’d have to clean it out I guess if you used it for anything else. I just leave the wax inside when I’m done, it cools and dries and I put it away and just plug it back in next time I’m ready to use it. Now here’s the time consuming part, it takes hours for the wax to melt again and I’m not a patient crafter so I hate waiting! I use a wooden spoon to help stir the wax (metal can get hot) and tweezers to dip with.  I lay my items on wax paper to cool. So all you do is make your item (in this case I made a collage of a fairy in a jar and cut them out) pick it up with the tweezers and VERY quickly dip it in and out of the wax, letting any excess drip back into the pot. If you leave it too long the wax will be too thick to see your art work underneath. If that does happen you can try to melt some of it and blow it out of the way with your heat tool. You can also dip a paint brush in the melted beeswax and brush it over larger objects like canvases. Then just lay it flat to dry and cool, don’t touch it while it’s wet, it drys pretty quickly.

So, I got out my beeswax pot the other day and made some really fun ATC’s (artist trading cards).  The jars are dipped, giving them the look of cloudy old glass, it’s hard to capture in a photo but they are very cool in person.

These will be listed for sale in my Etsy shop over the next few days.

Tags: ACEO, art, artist trading cards, ATC, beeswax, captured, collage, fairies, fairy, jar, mixed media

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 15th, 2009 at 9:21 am and is filed under ATC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.