Poppies in a Copper Pot

It's very difficult to photograph a painting that has a shiny black background.

Well, actually, the black is red and green and blue and more mixed together to make black.

The leaves are made of blues, greens and purples but are lost in the background if the light is too low. That's on purpose. The stars of the show are the beautiful poppies.

This picture taken outside shows the color better without so much reflected light.

You can see the color in the leaves better in this shot.

This painting is acrylic on canvas 36x48

By the Light of the Moon

I'm having a lot of fun with encaustic painting.

I'm not doing encaustic painting in the traditional sense as described on wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encaustic_painting but I call it encaustic because that sounds so much more artistic to me than "Yep. I melted crayons with an pink embosser that I bought at Hobby Lobby." (Disclaimer: pink was the only color they had the day I was at Hobby Lobby to buy the embosser.)

For this painting I started with an art board that had been painted black years ago. I added more black, purple and blue to the background to give it some depth and to make it a little moreinteresting in the light. You can't see anything but black form this photo.

The tree trunks and branches and the ground were all painted with acrylic paint. I had a little white moon at first but then decided it needed a big moon. The moon is white and yellow and was painted with thick acrylic paint so it has a lot of texture.

The leaves for the tree were the fun part. I chose several shades of yellow, orange and red and melted them with the embosser. The fun part is watching the melted wax swirl together and form interesting shapes and color combinations. The artist has a little control over where and how much wax to put in a particular spot, but a lot of the process is chance. It is guided chance, but chance none the less.

I'll have this painting in Hilldale's Art for Missions Silent Auction at the end of March.

Abstract Painting - Melted Crayon

My newest painting is melted wax crayons on canvas paper mounted to cardboard.

I suppose you could call it an encaustic painting, technically encaustic paintings are made with melted colored bees wax, not melted crayons. But encaustic sound so much more artistic. lol

I had the dining room in mind as I was creating this painting.

The room is painted in and decorated in whites and golds.

There's a small space between the kitchen door and the entry hall door that seemed like the perfect place for a painting like this.

Do paintings need names? I don't know.

for right now this one does not have a name. Maybe you can suggest one in a comment.

But actually, that's the cool thing about abstract art is that it says different things to different people, so I guess giving it a name takes that away to some extent. 

I may not ever name it now that I've thought about it.

I didn't know how to sign the painting. I tried painting my name with acrylic paint. It just slid around on the wax. I tried writing with a sharp crayon. Bad idea.

So I scratched my name in the wax with a sharp pencil and then filled in the scratched part with gold paint. I'm happy with how it turned out.