Author: lauramchugh

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Progression of Four Paintings

I’m doing four related encaustic paintings. They started as four nicely made 12×12″ wood panels onto which I put magic encaustic gesso (Holy Grail) on each panel. Then I used Elmer’s glue to adhere the background text.

This is the same text I used on four large panels from my work at Women’s Art Institute three years ago. Yesterday, I typed it all from the panels into a document (11 single spaced pages!), the printed it out in 11×11 squares on 11×17 paper. (I love 11×17 paper.)  I went out for a little while today to see the Children’s Art Walk downtown, the fired up the wax when I got back and started on panel #1 (0-10 yrs).

Here are three shots of the process. Tomorrow – ah – a day off. I’ll be able to work on Panels 2-4.

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Paint a Little Every Day

And it starts adding up to that 10,000 hours. Today, I did a diptych. Two 8×8″ panels that I had scraped some gawd-awful art off of earlier this week (remember when I had a bad day and used the torch and scraper when it arrived in the mail)?
The panels cleaned up nicely, so I experimented with colored wax, taped off areas, and image transfers (gotta love those image transfers). 
I put the panels right up against each other so they are “fused” together because the wax bridges them. It is a tentative connection. Not sure how long it will last. At least as long as I can keep the panels from flexing. I put a large binder clip on the back to hold them together. Optimal would be to hammer a piece of wood across them more permanently, but that might screw up the front.

Here is the whole piece:

and two detail shots.




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Another Encaustic and Prints Framed for PAL Show

Art for today was the following:
I’m loving working in wax. Here’s a 12×12.” The working title is “Burned.” It incorporates a print I did last year as the base, with several layers of images from other sources.
And here are my two fish prints. You may recall that I wasn’t too happy with them – the yellow color didn’t do much for me and the two watercolored fish on the right seemed too much on the surface. Last night I decided to put a light blue glaze over them as an homage to the fact that they are fish, in the water.
The technique allowed me to make scrapes in the surface of the yellow painting, though it didn’t seem to change the yellow too much. On the painting on the right, the blue added a depth to the piece that was nice. Also, just putting them in frames helped so, so much. They now look quite professional and I’m ready to put them in the PAL Show that will be up in June.