Tuesday!

Yep it's Tuesday. Now that I work 4 days in a row per week, Monday is the hump day. After that it's a breeze.

Here's a new encaustic painting. This one was done a little differently. I painted some of the flowers with oil paint directly on the wood, and then fused a layer of clear encaustic wax down. Then I painted a few more flowers in oil paint on the wax layer, and fused another layer of wax, etc etc. I like the way the oil paint goes on the wax, and then certain colors sort of break apart when you fuse wax on top of them. There are some cool effects to be had and I may try it with portraits.
24 x 11" encaustic & oil on braced birch wood panel. SOLD

Moonflowers

12 x 12" Original Encaustic painting on birch plywood.

I've had 2 encaustic paintings in the works for some time that I wanted to finish up today. This is the first one. I'm really happy with the darker background with the light yellow oil paint rub over the top. These particular flowers look lunar to me, thus the name. The 2nd is drying before I can add more wax, but nearly there. Both will be in my shop soon.

In other (totally unrelated) news, I've decided to stop using shampoo again. Thick, curly hair reportedly does better without it. I went without before for a time, and noticed good results, but then started shampooing again for some reason that I can't recall. The only problem is you have to go through a grease ball phase first while your hair adjusts. Time to break out the headbands..

Primary Flowers I & II

A pair of new 6x6" encauastic flowers for the shop.

More waxy flowers

24 x 11.5" encaustic on braced birch panel.

Encaustic flowers

5 x 6" encaustic on birch panel
After much experimentation trying to translate my previous flower paintings to encaustics, this is what I've come up with. There's really no controlling wax, which is what I sometimes love and sometimes hate about it. This was a good compromise. I was able to control the wax to some extent and do some drawing in it, which is fun, but there's also some lovely 'mistakes' where the wax blends and does what it will.
They are happy little paintings for Spring, and the best part is they smell fantastic!

Painting with gnats

Oil on birch panel 6 x 6"

After painting my imaginary flowers, I moved on to paint some actual flowers in our garden. I sat my stool down to paint a red tulip, but ended up painting the bleeding heart instead. I hope the tulip doesn't mind.
I battled swarms of gnats to paint these. They were out in force. Some met an untimely death in my palette. You'll be happy to know that none are buried in these paintings however.

In other news, I received a lovely email from Etsy seller/blogger Jade Scott, who posted about my Edie prints in her blog.. She makes great jewelry (lurve the necklaces..) and has some fantastic deals in her shop right now. Aside from her own work, she also posts great finds from Etsy. Thanks to her blog, I now see 100 more things I need to own.... sigh.

Spring is here!... or at least it was yesterday

6 x 6" oil on birch panel

Yesterday was gorgeous. In the 70s and perfect for sitting outside and painting. During the week, I had worked on two different 'people with glasses' paintings, but they were looking too forced and weren't working out. I took that as a sign to veer off into some imaginary flowers. These were really fun to paint. I mostly paint from observation, so it was fun to to paint from imagination for a change, and just lay down different shapes. While I did these in oil paint, I think I'll continue the idea with encaustics. More to come... who says that winter time is more productive for people? I get way more accomplished with some sunshine!