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.

My Violin

I really enjoyed painting this. The hardest part for me was getting the color of the violin. I tried many different ways to get brown using raw umber, burnt umber, burnt sienna and raw sienna and I tried adding other colors to those colors, but nothing looked right. I wanted the color that my violin is, not just some brown. I ended up using orange and blue! and the darker parts are orange and purple. for those of you new to mixing colors, when you use two colors that are oppostie each other on the color wheel you get brown or black, so it makes sense that I could get a brown color this way. I love the way it turned out. I've had many very nice compliments from people on flickr. You can read them here if you are interested.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bearhollowcreations/367513867/in/set-72157594427085595/

I thought you might like to see how the painting looked in progress.

Temporary Art

Not all art is meant to last forever. The joy is in the creating! Yesterday we did chalk art on the slate by the creek. Tonight's rain will wash it away as the slate goes under water.