Encaustic artwork

It's a glorious sunny Sunday here in Western Washington, the weather goddess kind of faked us out for while and sent some winter weather but the good stuff is back now. I finally finished my web design classes at the community college and have the software loaded up in the computer and am working my way through my huge manual. It is actually quite enjoyable, I love the "a-ha" moments when I do something right and it looks all purty. It will take a while before I have one designed for myself but I will get there.

ArtFest is just around the corner, the chatter on the Yahoo Group is reaching a fever pitch like it does every year. They have a gallery where you can display up to three of your pieces and I decided I might do some encaustic (wax) stuff. One of the classes I took last year at ArtFest was with the wonderful Judy Wise, a encaustic guru, the techniques I learned there along with the Encaustic Workshop book by Patricia Seggebruch  led me to these two pieces. Basically it is fusing specialty paper with encaustic medium (melted white beeswax and damar resin), adding layers of images, stickers, rub-ons and some texturing with oil paint, and more layers of medium. Finished touches were some gold foil detailing and addition of a micro-bead border on the blue piece. Great fun except the studio smelled like wax for a couple of days! Spousal Unit wanted to know what I was burning down.

The theme for ArtFest is Once Upon a Time so I am going to apply myself to making at least two pieces to take with that idea, perhaps something with fairies or dragons.

Last but not least I have to leave you with what seems to be my increasingly frequent cat pictures (Crazy Cat Ladies Unite!) but this was to cute not to share. Picture of Apollo is slightly blurry, I had to take it through the studio window, before he proceeded on to some other important thing, like chasing bugs.

The motto for this one is, "If you really don't have anything better to do, just sit and stare through the hole in the fence".