Sunday, August 7, 2011

Backgrounds

I have my monthly altered book class next weekend and we're going to learn how to do an encaustic technique.  We're supposed to bring our own collage materials for this particular class and I was struggling to come up with a theme....and then I decided it's going to be Sunflowers.  I don't know if you can actually do this technique in  an altered book, so I also prepared a background on a stretched canvas.  
The two pictures above have the identical colors, but you can see that in spreading the paint out....the canvas took the paint differently than the paper.  I spread the paints with an old credit card.  The colors are Night Sky, Basil Green and Quinacridone Azo Gold, with a little bit of matte medium mixed in.  I've been gathering "sunflower" themes/colors..a packet of sunflower seeds, a yellow felt button, some dried leaves, a poem called Bring Me The Sunflower by Eugenio Montale,  nature stamps...bee, butterfly, dragonfly...somewhere in my art room I have some tiny sunflowers on floral wire but I'll be darned if I can find them....

2 comments:

Emelie said...

So interesting to me to see how paint reacts to different surfaces. How it reacts to different movement by the tools we use. Even how I can't really make a background that is the same twice.

These are rich and now I feel the need to have something like that, summer is moving quickly by and the thoughts of these rich tones are coming into my thoughts. The Dick Blick catalog of sales had rich colors on the cover.

Morna Crites-Moore said...

These are gorgeous! Love them. I have been wanting to try encaustic for ages .... maybe you'll teach me someday. :-)