Happy Birthday USA

Hi there people in blog land. Today I am posting a layout I did for a class recently that featured beeswax. I love working with beeswax & finally opened my Melting Pot by Ranger. One of the challenges for me is I don't always feel like bringing out the machines, it seems like a bit of an effort when you just want to quickly add something to a page. Other times I want to work on multiple projects at once & I don't mind dragging stuff out. Sound familiar? The great thing about beeswax is all you need is your heat gun to add a touch or more. I use the ranger heat gun to start getting the beeswax to melt & move to the standard but "windier" version to move the wax around. The standard gun is trickier to melt the wax as it blows the pellets, but you just need to keep the gun further away until the wax starts to melt & gradually move it closer to the project. 

I started with corrugated cardboard & added printed paper with decoupage glue. Next step was some dylusions sprays with stencils & random stamping to create the base. I layered my objects in with wax. Heating a thin layer & embedding the objects into the wax, than fusing the wax with a bit of heat. A fun technique is the stamp. I stamped the star on the bottom layer, put a thicker layer of wax over the area & let it cool a bit. When the wax was still soft using a stylist follow the lines of the stamp to create grooves in the wax. Add layers of wax over this area with a brush. Only natural bristle brushes work in wax as the heat melts synthetic. Also your brush cannot be cleaned, only reused with wax projects. Add the wax lightly, moving the brush in the same direction. The wax will adhere to itself. When the desired depth is reached touch up the lines with your stylist if you need to. 

Another product that works well with the wax is perfect pearls powder. I dusted the powder over the cooled wax around the edges to create a nice shimmer.  It binds to the wax naturally. If the powder is not adhering well either heat the wax just a touch to warm it or swipe it with perfect medium & apply the powder. Practice makes perfect so just go play!

Journal Box

 I was working on my project life & made what I think is a super cool journal box and it was so easy! I had taken a picture of the victory page of my son's epic computer game. I  asked him about the game & wrote it out and printed it from my computer. Using a stencil and 2 of the spring distress inks decided to sponge the color on with a blending tool. The cool, cool thing about these 2 colors is they blend together to make a really pretty green color so where the colors meet I have this 3rd color. Love it!

Here is a picture of the quote on my project life page. Yay I have 6 weeks of my entire life down!!!! All forward movement counts!

Playing with Pens

After watching a Dyan Reavely video on the Ranger Blog I decided I would immediately play with the technique. It is called shadow stamping, see it here. You can vaguely see my shadow leaves but I was already distracted by this point. I ended up making it more about which color would show up the best on top of the archival ink. I used sakura souffle & glaze pens, they work the best of the gel pens I have tried. I discovered the souffle pen works great on the archival ink, glaze doesn't show up so much. However if you let the souffle dry & then put glaze on top it shows up great & almost creates a shiny embossed look. You can see in the photo below-the orange glaze looks really prominent.

This is a fun page & allows me at a glance to see which souffle color I may want to choose. White definitely shows up the best but sometimes I may want some color. Your art journal is the perfect place to play with product!