Here are some more of the little (5″x5″) encaustic paintings I’ve been working on.  I am more, or less, using the small format to experiment with different techniques and to get to know the medium a little better.

Untitled as of yet.  Here you can see where I carved into the wax, for a textural effect. I left the trees smooth.  This was fun to make, mostly because of the colors and, well, because it’s trees.  I’ll have to try something similar on a larger scale.

“Flower Plot” involved a lot of carving and layering over and over.  I like how the carved flowers, which are actually one of the bottom layers, look closer than the flowers with the translucent over-layer (difficult to see in the photo, perhaps).

“Ornamented” - I was going for opal - turned out more like granite, but I like it.  This one did take quite a while with all the carving involved (even though it is small).

  “Nesting Place” - the goal here was to play around with the depth. I wanted the center of the nest-like object to look deeper than the outer layer.  I did this by layering clear over that part and continuing to add more layers of the incised & filled lines.

It’s hard to do the paintings justice in photographs because it’s difficult to show the depth you can achieve by layering the beeswax.  The irony of encaustic is that so many of its wonderful characteristics which make it so fun to work with, are also the very things that make it so challenging.  But, despite the challenges & frustrations, I’m truly loving it.

Creativity Question:  Where does your time go?  How much went to what you wanted to do (creative pursuits)?

As much as I’d like to claim that a lot of my time goes to cleaning (ha!), it’s not true.  I’ve noticed that I spend too much time on my computer - and shamefully, much of that time isn’t what would be considered productive.  So, I’m trying to do better about varying my routine and balancing things out a bit.  My goal is to discipline myself a little bit better so that  I can get more done around here (I mean DONE), and then I’ll have more time to do what I *want*.