The Birth of Venus?

For our new projects I am hoping to reproduce "The Birth of Venus." Is nudity allowed? Obviously it's tastefully done in this piece, but I don't know how these kids would react or how much they're used to... Well, if it's allowed, I dibs this piece. No idea what I'm going to do for the second piece yet.

Awesome Judy Wise Encaustic

Well, I was going to post pics of all of my 12 completed pieces, just to see them all lined up together, but I realized that I don't have them or a camera to take pictures of them! Instead I decided to check out what Judy Wise has been doing. I love this bird picture she made! It's amazing what this woman can do with wax-- I feel like such a klutz when I work in encaustic. There's something about it that I really like though... hopefully I can continue it in the future.

Graph

My next piece is all about koi fish. I love it when artists use graphs like the one in the picture in their work! Something about lines gets to me.... Look at Eric Rue's page for some examples. Anyway, I decided to incorporate these designs into my fish piece. Fish scales seem very mathematically organized to me, and something about them reminds me of graphs.... I just hope no one mistakes it for a fish net about to catch them all. I guess this idea is pushing it a little, but I think it's going well so far.

The Plan

Not much to say, but my plan for the chickens piece is solidifying a little. I want to use this picture, and use some collage elements... Maybe encaustic? It's tough but I'm starting to get attached to it. I like the lines of the wall that show up near her head so I think I'll do something that accentuates those.

It's definitely going to be painful getting everything finished by the 24th... I've already started on some but in all I have five pieces to complete this month. Uh oh.

Last Pieces...

Down to two more pieces (well, for me only sort of) already... Yikes. One month does not seem like enough time.

I'm running short on ideas for the last two at the moment, but here's what I have.

1. Chickens picture. (Poor Marj and Evelyn... they sounded like awesome pets.) I want to do something less realistic, more conceptually abstract like the crows pic. I'm thinking of light colors for the background, and exaggerating the colors in the feathers.

2. Hmm.. Any ideas? I'm not even sure what animal to do. One tentative idea I had was doing a very loose, abstract-ish painting of my parakeets... but I don't want to over do it on the birds, so I'm not sure. Thoughts on a good animal to do? Maybe llamas, they are great portrature subjects. The painting is by Kellee Beaudry, isn't it cool?

Cool art up at Powell's

This month's Powell's has the work of Cynthia Moore up in the Pearl Room. Very inspiring, especially sense she does encaustic portraits of animals. Sound familiar? Anyway, her art is very gorgeous, and a great example of the cool stuff you can do with encaustic. I think that, like Judy, she does acrylic paintings that she later cuts out and covers with wax... I will have to try that.

The swans aren't up at Powell's, but they are the only example of her work that I could find online.

February Pieces

So these were my pieces for February. Neither is finished, and I'm a bit stuck with both of them. The picture of Liberty, Cider's puppy, is a bit too cutesy right now. I love the photo of Liberty, but I've lost the great expression she has. The painting style itself isn't striking enough to make up for this. Right now it really reminds me of paint by number-- maybe the colors? Or one of those Lisa Frank stickers (remember those from grade school? I used to love them.)

As for the goats, I'm wondering what I ought to do for their

colors. I want to make this one more stylized but I'm not sure where to start.

Can't wait to meet with Judy Wise and mess around with encaustic, though! Maybe I can produce something

concentration-worthy... Sorry about the long post. I commend you for getting this far. Now leave a comment! Good job.

Hmmm...

Remember this piece? Well it's back, and I need an opinion for it. The last picture is where I am with it now. I don't like the middle one, but I can't decide whether it's better with white or with the grey in the background. I think I really just need to stare at it for a while, but it would be helpful to get some of your thoughts on it also.

Evil Goats

Someone, I think Kelsey, suggested a while ago that I should do a picture with a goat, so this is my newest piece. I think that goats are sort of creepy, and if you get really close to one and have a good look at its eyes (they have sideways pupils) they seem really unnatural. So I want to give this piece an unsettling ambiance, if possible. I have a few qualms about the compostion of the current sketch on my canvas, it is refusing to cooperate like my original sketch did. Do you think that it's a big problem? It's still in the early stages, so suggestions would be super helpful.

More Lizards

So I added another lizard onto the painting; I think it works a lot better this way. The positioning of the tails annoys me a little, but I tried a couple other placments and this seems to be the best one. It just seemed a little too much like the first one was mirrored over the middle of the canvas... but I think it's about as good as I'm going to get it. I have more detail to add to the lizard, but hopefully I can finally be finished with this piece soon.

This month's other pieces

I'm not really sure what to do with my lizard piece-- not really a big fan. I was wondering about maybe adding some darker patterns in the background, to try and replicate the pattern on the lizard's back, but I'm not sure if that would turn out.

I'm going to try adding some light background elements to the dog one, and clean up the feet a little more, but mostly I'm happy with that one. Should I bother to add more of the little bird pictures like I said I would in the last post, or can just that one stand alone?

???

New Piece

This is a new piece that I have been working on. It's about 6" by 6", painted on a piece of wood. If you can't tell, it's a baby parakeet. I painted this from a video still, so I was thinking about doing this as a series of a couple paintings-- thoughts?