Nebula

(If you read this post earlier, I've changed the name from "Galaxy" to "Nebula.")

I've been experimenting with gold leaf and acrylics. I didn't have a outer space in mind when I made this painting, but it kind of reminds me of pictures I've seen at the planetarium or from Hubble. 

I don't suppose paintings have to have names...... but I'm calling this one "Nebula."

It is acrylic and gold leaf on a 16x20 canvas.

It has a gold sheen that changes how it looks from different directions and different lighting. 

Here it is hanging up in our bonus room.

Nebula on Wikipedia

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. 

Painting with Crayons

Over the years I've slowly gathered up restaurant crayons. It seems like a small thing, but I hated seeing perfectly good crayons headed for the trash after a short use on a Red Lobster children's menu. So as the rest of the family gathered their things I walk around the table and gather the barely used crayons.

Once home they would usually spend time in my closet next to my billfold, but eventually they would end up with all of the crayons I had rescued from boxes and restaurants and various children. I always thought that one day I would sort them in this nice "Lazy Susan" we got from Cheryl's Granny Kay. (I doubt that will ever really happen. It kind of takes the fun out of searching for just the right crayon.)

A fun thing to do with used broken crayons is to make BIG multi-colored crayons out of them. You take the paper off of them, break them up where they will fit in a muffin tin, heat up the oven (not too hot) and then let them melt. Stir the melted was a little after they melt or you'll end up with clear wax on the top and color on the bottom. After they cool (duh) pop them out and you have cool discs of color for your kiddos. They are great for making rubbings. (You know - where you lay a piece of paper on a rough surface and then rub the crayon over it....)

About a year ago I saw something new to try with crayons. Crayola made some crayons to use in making melted crayon paintings. I bought some canvas boards and my daughter, Christy, and I tried to paint with a hair dryer, using it to melt the crayons. It sort of worked, but we weren't happy with the process. The hair dryer melted the wax, but it blew so hard there was little you could do to control where the wax went.

A couple of months ago I saw an acrylic painting that inspired me to try a new way to paint with crayons. I new that a hair dryer blew too hard and made the melted wax spray across the canvas, so I bought an embossing heater. A heat gun would have been good. I would show you a picture of it, but the only one they had at Hobby Lobby was pink and I don't want you to know that I have a pink embosser. :-)

OK. This has been way too long of an introduction. Here's what I want to show you. How you can make your own really cool fall colored tree using melted crayons...

First, I painted the sky, the ground and the trunk of a tree using acrylic paints.

I then took a lot of different red crayons from different restaurants and boxes and tested melting them to see what shade of red they made when melted.

Then I held a darker red crayon in my hand and heated it up with the embosser and I let the wax drip onto the canvas board.

I added layers of different shades of red, melted away parts where I thought it was too full and ended up with this.

Here's a close up. I like the way the wax would splatter when I held the crayons further away.

 The reds seemed a little too much and I needed some highlights, so I added a little orange to it.

Now my red tree is in a silent auction for missions. The money raised is helping some of our High School students go to Buenos Aires, Argentina on a mission trip at the end of June into July.

Here it is on the auction table. It is 16x20, acrylic and wax on canvas board. It has a nice wooden frame that really sets it off don't you think?

You can bid on this painting by calling Hilldale's Family Life Center. As of this writing today, the current bid is $150. The auction ends May 9.

Family Tree

It isn't a family tree in that grandma and grandpa are at the bottom and then mom and dad and aunts and uncles on the first branches and then all the children on the next, but it is a beautiful tree for showing off grandbaby pictures.

 

I started off with a dirty (grandbaby grime) builder's beige wall. 

Painted it a pretty blue. This picture does not really show how beautiful this blue is.

 

Then I took some brown paint (I don't remember the exact color. It was a sample jar from Lowes.) and painted a tree - trunk and limbs.

 

I bought a package of small sponges and cut out some leaves.

These sample colors are from Wal-Mart. They are only a couple of dollars each. I bought "forest green" and a blue/gray color called "totally teal" (if I'm reading the bottle correctly).

 
 
 
 

 

 

 Here are the leaves on the tree. Hmmm. I guess I should have taken a close-up picture for you to see. The sponges added a nice texture to the paint.

 

 

Painting with a Straw and Brush

This is a cool video I thought you would enjoy watching. The artist paints the tree branches by blowing acrylic paint through a straw.