Two years later...

I'm continuing to keep a blog of my work over at shelbyweston.wordpress.com for anyone interested. Latest image as of now is this one...


















Come on, you know you want to visit the new site...

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.