Life skills - candle-and-ink wrapping paper

Spending money on giftwrap, which just gets torn off and thrown away, seems pointless to me - I'd rather have the fun of making it from simple and/or redundant materials.

It doesn't always turn out well, though....

I started by rubbing a plastic doily with a candle onto newspaper, and ran the iron over it so the wax would soak in -

 then covered the paper with ink from the huge bottles found on sale many years ago - limited to magenta, orange, red, yellow. Here they are drying. Did I think the ink would be thick and solid, like black in is?? -

The ink colours lose their rich promise when the ink dries, but the idea sort of works in small sections of the reverse of the sheets of newspaper, where the ink has soaked through -

Otherwise, the words and pictures get in the way of the patterning.

Back to the drawing board, or rather the rubbing board, with plain newsprint this time, and with a bit of colour splodging and mixing -

Still wet - but much more like what I had in mind! However ... newsprint gets "crisp" very easily and you have to be very careful when making those tidy corners on the parcels - it can tear so easily.

(update) Here they are, the ghosts of xmas 2012 -

Art I like - Elissa Levy

Usually fringes and fraying - especially fraying - send me running, but this has me looking and thinking -

Spin (Newly Born), 2011

Newspaper, gouache, gel pen, spray paint, 37" x 32.5"

The colour and the form held my eye, and I had to enlarge the photo (and read the statement) to see the content - the concentration on the core of the body, the allusion to phantom limbs.

The fringing reminds me of the reason those frontiersman buckskin jackets have fringes - to draw the rain off the body - it drips down off the fringes, rather than soaks in. The touches of colour are like a liquid, or something less physical, seeping out, ready to drip away. The central colour is core heat, like inside a volcano, or a very very vivid sunset foretelling a change in the weather. The delicate strips of paper will move gently as someone walks past. The newspaper will age and yellow. As a material, it reminds me of its use as wallpaper in the humblest of dwellings, layers on layers struggling to keep out the wind; the way wallpaper can come off at the edges....

That's what, from a distance, it says to me. In the context of her other work, that reading changes.