Chop

"Chop"

Image size 9" x 12"

Encaustic

This is NOT what I had in mind when I started this painting, but I'm very happy with the outcome.  I can't seem to stay away from painting water, probably because the encaustic medium is so beautiful for creating paintings of water.  I love the colors in the water and will probably do a much larger painting with this same feeling.  

Rainy Season

"Rainy Season"

Image Size 15" x 45"

Acrylic

We've been having another heat wave this week which made me want to paint something with cool, soothing colors that would remind me of how nice it's going to be when we get some rain.  I've been working on a large painting using acrylics and am really enjoying this medium so I decided to use it for this week's painting.  It is so versatile. It can be used thick like oil paint or thinned like watercolor.

For this painting, I mostly used the paints as I would watercolor paints, thinning them down so that they would run.  There are some areas where the paint is thicker, but mostly it is thin.  Acrylics really shouldn't be thinned with water too much because it affects the adhesion of the paint and it could flake off.  I should have used an acrylic medium to thin it, but the paint still would have been too thick.  I am planning to apply several coats of a UV varnish over this which will stabilize the paint as well as protect it from bright light so having thinned the paint won't be a problem.

Morning Mist

"Morning Mist"

Image size 15.5" x 15.5"

Encaustic

I love the subtle colors in this painting.  I started it by using mostly wax already mixed on my palette as the underpainting.  There were oranges and purples, blues and greens.  All of them mixed together to make some really beautiful color combinations.  They are peeking through the more subtle subsequent layers.

Froth

"Froth"

Image size 8" x 8"

Encaustic

This is just a small water study.  I was working on a large painting this week so I didn't spend much time on my weekly painting.  Hopefully next week I will post a more detailed painting.

Canyon Wall

"Canyon Wall'

Image size 10.5" x 21.5"

Watercolor

I've been feeling sad that my watercolor roots have been largely ignored over the past year because I've fallen in love with encaustic.  This past weekend, Watercolor West started their yearly series of watercolor demonstrations that are offered during their annual international juried watercolor exhibition.  I am fortunate that this show is in my area and I look forward to it every year.  I didn't enter any paintings this year because I had nothing that I felt would be good enough to be chosen.

The first demonstration each year is my favorite because the juror of the show is the demonstrator and before he does his demo, he shows slides of all of the paintings that were juried into the show and tells why each was chosen.  What a wonderful education!  Of course, each judge has different reasons for choosing a painting, but it is still always good to hear what a judge likes.

I didn't really have time to attend on Sunday and almost didn't go, but I felt that it would be a good way to push me toward returning to watercolor.  Although I didn't stay for the afternoon portion when the juror,  John Salminen, demonstrated his painting style, I still learned a lot from him and am once again motivated to put watercolor paint to paper and use the unique qualities of those paints in a (hopefully) creative way. 

This painting was done on a saturated piece of paper.  One of the qualities that I love in watercolor paints that cannot be found in any other medium is the sedimentary action of some pigments.  That doesn't happen with all of the colors, but the ones that have that quality are among my favorites.

Daniel Smith makes a lot of colors that are very sedimentary because they use a lot of natural pigments which have heavy particles that fall into the valleys in the textures of watercolor paper.  My favorites are Lunar Earth and Lunar Black.  Lunar Earth is a rust colored pigment that is so beautiful alone, but can also be mixed with other colors to get that wonderful sedimentary effect.  I know using straight black in art is not recommended, but I use it anyway because I love the color black, especially in abstract paintings.  It can also be mixed with any color to take advantage of that wonderful textural quality that it has.

I used those two pigments along with ultramarine blue, another sedimentary color, to create a feeling of heavily textured canyon walls in this painting.  Other colors were mixed in and melded with the sedimentary colors to create this effect.  Here is a detail of the painting.  It might look more yellow because I just took a picture of it, but had to do it inside under incandescent light because the sun has set here.  Anyway, it shows the wonderful sedimentary qualities that can be achieved with these particular paints.