The Pond

"The Pond"

Image Size 12" x 32"

Encaustic

Well, this was fun to paint as well as a being a learning experience.  I don't usually work this large in encaustic, but I really like big paintings.  This is still small compared to watercolors, oils and acrylics that I've done.  Working in encaustic is more time consuming and takes a lot more material than the other mediums that I use.  Each layer needs to be fused before adding more wax and it becomes more difficult to control the wax as the layers build.  I had real problems with the flowers in this painting because the blues and green surrounding them kept migrating into the flowers.  I kept scraping the flowers and adding more white, but continued to have the same problem.  I put a layer of clear medium over the entire painting and fused that before trying to add white again.  That did solve the problem of the greens and blues migrating, but the white continued to move uncontrollably.  I finally got it pretty close to how I wanted it and then added orange oil pastel to edges of the lily pads and brought some of the color into the white flowers which made them much more interesting.  I like the sketchy look of the pastels so I also added some lines with white oil pastel to the lilies.

I'm really happy with this one and can't wait to polish it.