Yesterday at work, I was painting the windows of Opus for the Back to School sales that start September 1st and on the windowsill was a dead dragonfly that had gotten trapped in the store a few months before.
We all wondered where it had gone and there it was, all crispy and sunbaked. I decided that those wings were going into an art. Of course having a twin, I had to share my treasure, but I only needed two for my vision anyway.
So, I got someone else to cut the wings off, because it's a bug, and im not touching any gross dead bug, and I carted them home to encase on a painting in wax.
It's still drying, but I can share with you the glories of cold wax medium.
Cold wax medium is Wax with mineral spirits. The wax can be bought in cans and it is soft and will stay soft as long as you keep your tin closed tight.
Cold wax is a medium you use with oil paints. It's a matting agent that you can mix into your oil paints. It gives the paint a matte finish when it's dry and if you use enough, can give some texture as well.
I don't use it as a matting agent though. I followed my sisters idea and used it more for encasing found objects on a canvas.
I prefer cradle panels, but sometimes I use canvas.
This most recent piece I used an 8x8 deep canvas, because I had intended to submit it to the Anonymous art show, but Im not sure if I still will. I like it alot.
Anyway, so what I did was primed the canvas with Tri-art Canvas Gesso. It's a tan colour, much the colour of raw canvas. It's nice, because when I work on Canvas, im not a fan of painting on white. I don't mind white when I paint on paper though, go figure.
The canvas I bought was already tripple primed, so I only did one coat of the Tri-art Gesso, just to change the colour.
So after it's primed, and it's dry, i used tri-art and Golden burnt umber, portrait pink and titanium white to dry brush and smear some textures. I was going for sweet and girly so I kept it very light.
Being acrylics they dried very quickly and I was able to move onto the fun part right away.
I use a pallet knife and the wax spreads like butter, it's smooth, creamy and easy to spread.
I put a layer of cold wax, not too thick, just to create a surface for my found objects to stick to.
The wax dries quite slowly, so you have plenty of working time, so don't rush.
I took some grass picked on our trip to alberta. I traded my sister two dragonfly wings for some blades of alberta grass, because I didn't think to pick any while we were there.
But I got to the dragonfly first, so it worked out.
Anyway, I arranged my grass in the corner. I always tend to gravitate to the bottom corners when I do foreground, and it sucked, because mine turned out a little too close to how my sisters turned out, but it's okay.
I layed my grass down, and it took quite a few tries to get the grass to look right. You may think that doing abstract is easy and requires no thought or planning, but that is not true...
More on that in another post.
Anyway, after almost 45 minutes of picking off, moving and changing the grass I got the pattern I was looking for, now it was time to add the dragonfly wings and little details.
First, I took two interesting looking grass seed pods and put them together. They looked like cute bugs.
Then I carefully, because they were very brittle and delicate, layed down the dragonfly wings.
Once everything is in place, I used a pallet knife again and layed down soe layers of Cold Wax Medium.
Cold wax medium does not dry 100% clear. It has a fogyness, that is quite beautiful. It's wax, so it'll dry like wax. So I varied the thickness of the wax in areas with my pallet knife to create some less vibrant/clear areas. It adds texture and detail.
I let it dry overnight, ut it wasn't quite dry today and I noticed that the dragonfly wings were not down as well as they should be. So I added some more wax today and some texture.
This is the undried product, the wax will clear up slightly and dry very hard.
I suggest you try this product, it is very cool =D
Gamblin Cold Wax Medium!
