I am so excited to share a new idea I have for a whole series of new paintings. I shared with you in my June newsletter, that I am taking an online sketchbook workshop with Karen Stamper from the UK, and shared a video of its pages in progress. Well, I have fallen so in love with the methods I am learning, that I decided that I wanted to explore the ideas further in actual paintings. I have made it my goal to produce 25-30 paintings in all sizes as part of this series. I have NEVER done a series of this depth and magnitude before, and I am super pumped by the idea. I thought that I would share some insights into the work with you here in my newsletter -if you are not an artist, you might be interested to see how these things come about, and if you are an artist, perhaps you can be inspired to create a series of your own!
I knew I had as my starting parameters that I wanted to work with inks, dry media and collage as the under layers of the paintings. I decided that I would then take these beginnings into my encaustic studio to complete the work. Interestingly, I also decided to severely limit my palette for this series, based on the more neutral paintings I showed you in the last newsletter. (BTW, thanks so much to all who wrote to me to encourage me in this new direction!!)
So now I had the kernel of an idea! The following are the first 5 pieces as they looked at the end of the first stage of the process. I have used blue and black india ink, charcoal, water soluble crayons, brown Artgraf chalk, sepia calligraphy ink, graphite sticks and collage in all of these. The beautiful yellow green was made with black india ink plus some diluted yellow acrylic ink. For the collage, I hit up my HUGE stash of papers that I have hand made, or collected in the case of the text pieces, over the last 20 years. (Did I mention I LOVE making collage papers?) These are very rough and full of possibility at this stage. I decided to stick with the colour scheme of blue and yellow-green (which I realized later are my branding colours -no wonder I was drawn to them!) and some burnt sienna, plus black and white. It was fun to search all over my 2 studios to find dry and wet media that conformed to these colours. As I decided that I would take these to encaustic, I needed to be careful NOT to select anything that had acrylic paint on it, as wax and acrylic do not mix!
As an aside, before I got the idea for this series, I had decided to sell all of my encaustic supplies, as I have a small fortune invested and figured I was unlikely to use them again. So using the wax in this series was to be my final 'kick at the can' as they say. The reality is that I had forgotten how much I loved to work with hot wax! The smell of the melting beeswax, the quick working time and the ability to make changes rapidly by adding or taking away, make this medium so alluring. |
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