AisA Academy

Calla Lily #3 July 30, 2009

This morning I played hooky from packing for a camping trip in order to  to work on my calla lily series.  I really want more time to myself these days–and it was a pleasant treat to squeeze this in.

Yet another technique variation–though this didn’t occur on purpose.  After my first calla lily encaustic, I embedded three other photos as prep to painting over them.  Here is currently what 2 of them look like:

The third I can’t show you because it is what I painted over.  Yesterday’s painting had no overcoat of clear wax. Instead, once I had pressed the photo onto a bed of wax, I used the encaustic paints directly on the photo. Today, there was a coat of clear wax upon which I put the color. When I went to fuse the layers with the heat gun, the clear wax underneath also melted–and as pigment is denser than the wax, the clear wax has a tendency to float to the top disrupting the color in odd places. I had to do a lot of touch up to the black areas…which made the surface irregular…which required more melting to smooth it out. This made the colors of the flower melt more and loose some of their definition. The end result is irregular, but still rather striking (or at least I think so.)

This time I also tried painting all the white areas first, and them doing a preliminary fusing. This is because white melts at a higher temperature. Yesterday I had trouble with the other colors getting too runny and starting to flow into each other before the white was sufficiently melted.  Getting the right sequence of colors and melting will take some experience.

The other struggle I had was trying to get a good photo of my end result. Because the surface still is not very smooth, the ambient light catches in odd spots and reflecting back to create areas of white where there really are none on the piece.  If I take the photo in  low light, the result is grainy.  Using a flash is a disaster.

Here’s the best I could accomplish–with the original photo on the right for comparison:

The camera is doing some funny things to the colors because in the actual painting, the leaves are much more green and less yellow which is more pleasing to me.

There are some other tricks in encaustic which I can experiment with–like carving into a ground layer of wax (that’s called intarsia), then filling in the carved areas by painting over them with another color and finally scraping away the excess (see Lisa’s explanation here on Intarsia.) But for now, I will forge ahead on this series, concentrating on color mixing and the sequence of my fusings.

Post series: New Project,   Calla Lily #2,  Calla Lily #3,  Calla Lily #4,  Back to Encaustics

Calla Lily #2 July 29, 2009

Ooooo. I had time to mess with the encaustic today. If you read my previous post, you know that my first technique was to embed a photo in clear beeswax and then touch it up using encaustic paint. I wanted to try and make the colors bolder and with more contrast—instead of having the milky-translucence of clear wax on top. So today, after embedding the photo, I used paint on the entire surface, including the black background. The result is quite different, and I learned a lot.

I have never tried to mix-to-match colors before (ever!), so that was a fun challenge. (Addendum: to get the shadow-gray to look right I had to add in green and yellow. Who would have thought!) Also, the various colors melt at different temperatures (I use a heat gun to melt each layer to fuse them) so it was a challenge to melt enough to remove texture and heavy brush stokes without having everything melt into mush.

Anyway—I like both effects. They are just different. It’s difficult to show the detail, but here they are. Which do you like best?

First method:

Second method:

Post series: New Project,   Calla Lily #2,  Calla Lily #3,  Calla Lily #4,  Back to Encaustics

New Project July 29, 2009

My life is currently so full of things these days which could drag me down if I let them: my father-in-law’s cancer, the difficulty of connecting with my teenage son, the prospect of a significant increase in government control of  medical care, and the progressive destruction of wealth and future prosperity due to mistaken fears and “solutions” to climate change. In an interesting reaction,  I find I am drawn more and more toward fiction and art. The former is clearly an escape, allowing me to immerse myself in worlds of my own choosing, but the latter is a rediscovered release–an active focus on beauty, and on my own productive creativity.

Art, as a “selective recreation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value judgments,” * presents the opportunity and the challenge of choosing what I think is worth my time and effort to construct and will provide continued pleasure through repeated viewing. It expands upon the idea of finding 3 good things to balance out the mundane and discouraging parts of life.

I have never put in the time to develop my skills at drawing, so it’s a major commitment to start from scratch and create a visual image I find pleasing. Instead, I find photography an excellent way to capture a piece of reality, with the selection of subject and the composition of visual elements within the photo serving as the aspects which make it creative and a unique expression of my metaphysical values.

After my first attempt at encaustic collage, I tried to make another just using wax. The result was a learning experience not worth keeping and I eventually melted it off the claybord and threw away. My latest idea is to use my own photos as a starting point. Below is the first one of a set of 4 images of a calla lily from my backyard which I was able to capture with the early morning sun illuminating it against the dusky-black of a foggy dawn.

After adhering the photo to a claybord, I used the encaustic paint (pigmented beeswax) to heighten the color and add obvious brush strokes. I like the effect, though I want to try it again with even more use  of the paints to make the contrasts bolder, and just to see how it changes.

Here is the photo:

and here is the encaustic:

I am generally pleased with how it turned out and can’t wait to experiment more and to work on the other three photos.

* pg. 19 The Romantic Manifesto by Ayn Rand

Post series: New Project,   Calla Lily #2,  Calla Lily #3,  Calla Lily #4,  Back to Encaustics 

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First Encaustic July 13, 2009

This past week I tried a new art technique: encaustic. This is painting and collaging with beeswax. For more information on this medium, check out the website of my friend and instructor at Open Studio. I have already learned a lot. I am intrigued with experimenting to improve my ability to capture my ideas concretely.

Here is my first attempt:

I made many mistakes….some of which I was able to correct. Others I have accepted as just part of the piece.

I’d like to learn how to further soften the edges of Lady Justice, and I have some ideas to try.

I want to see what happens when I embed flower petals and other fragments from nature.

And what will it be like to try and actually create a realistic image using the beeswax “paint”?  I can already tell that it will be pretty tricky.

Oooo. I love new things!!

Addendum 7/25/09: For the source of the central image “Lady Justice” see my previous blog post.