Collage and Creativity

The key ingredients in the work of Elaine Brady Smith who loves creating encaustic and mixed media art include vintage papers and hand printed collage papers made with repetitive marks, simplistic shapes, and transparent layers.She attempts to give you a tutorial on adding Collage and imbedding objects.

Handmade papers such as Japanese mulberry, lace papers, your own handmade pulp papers, and other natural fiber handmade papers are perfect for encaustic collage.Tissue paper is a good and inexpensive alternative, whether it is white, coloured, or printed. You can build up many transparent layers with tissue paper and incorporate your own marks by drawing or writing on it.

• To pre-wax a piece of collage paper for the Tacking Iron Method, place the paper on your palette or griddle.
• Pick the paper up with a pair of tweezers, and allow excess wax to drip off.
• When the pre-waxed collage paper is cool, place it on the surface of your art. With a preheated tacking iron, gently iron the piece into place.he process of using the tacking iron automatically fuses the wax layers.
• Once the wax cools, you can add more collage layers to your piece, overlapping them as you go.
• On imbedding objects some objects to add might be buttons, game pieces, jewelry pieces, and natural plant materials.To add objects, 
• Brush a small puddle of encaustic medium to the area on your art where you’d like to place the object.
• Dip your object into the encaustic medium and lay it on your hot palette to allow some of the excess wax to drip off.
• With a pair of tweezers, pick up the object and place it on the wax puddle on your surface.

There you have it!