Water in Wax

This encaustic piece began with the photo in my last post. I took the photo and saved several different ways in Photoshop and printed on very thin tissue, and also did a pastel drawing of it. The images are then layered in wax with some oil paint and oil stick colors added. Seems whenever I photograph and post encaustic pieces I find things I don't like about the piece. For the time being, I'm not changing. I'll just live with it a bit. Sometimes stepping away is the best thing to do.

Handmade encaustic book

I recently took a workshop Encaustic & the Artist Book taught by Catherine Nash.  The class was a great learning experience and lots of fun! Two of my friends also took the workshop. Thank you to Catherine and other workshop participants! Here are the results of my first encaustic board book.

Book cover

A little Photoshopping to the book cover. I wondered if maybe the blue should be sky after the fact...

The back.

The pages.

 On a side note: I don't like photographing my artwork. I like making photographs, but not of my artwork. I've historically tried to make quick snapshots with a point and shoot camera. I did this of this book yesterday, late afternoon indoors, with camera flash going off. Ugh! They were bad. So today I went outside and made these.Nice light in the shade and no flash. Much better.

Draw Cats in Bed

I've never had much talent for drawing, nor have I ever thought of working on my drawing skills until I ran across this book, "52 Creative Exercises to Make Drawing Fun! - Drawing Lab for Mixed Media Artists", by Carla Sonheim. My friend, Barbara Herman, expressed interest in doing the drawing exercises also. So we met yesterday to share the results of our 1st assignment, Drawing Cats in Bed! The assignment was to get comfy in bed and draw about 30 cats from your imagination, working quickly, say spend about 10 minutes to complete the assignment. Well, Barbara and I had quite a few chuckles yesterday sharing our cat drawings. Nice to be drawing  (and learning) just for fun. So here are my cats.

Taking it further: I selected one of these funny cats, scanned it and did some Photoshop work on it. Here are the results:

As Hettie would say, LOL! This week we're doing giraffes. Should be interesting!