The wonderful Etsy Maine Team is having an ACEO team challenge.  The idea was to make an ACEO with a Maine theme that was also recycled/upcycled.  I made these three while at Jes' craft brunch on Sunday.  They are all made on top of recycled cereal and cell phone boxes courtesy of my hubby, and the collaged images are all from Country Living magazines that were in desperate need of being recycled.  Here's the skinny on them:

A progress photo of a new encaustic painting I started today. Part of my "Ghosts of the Past" series, this one features a great civil war image of Abe Lincoln visiting a camp.

This is my largest encaustic painting yet and I wanted to show the scale so I took this cheese-ball pic of me holding it :) This is just the first layer of paint and I've since added another-- this one's going to take a little bit longer than the rest! Fusing the layers is an arm aching experience but I still really enjoy it!

The top of the painting has a pink sky and the bottom, so far is a greyish green. I'm thinking of using alot of grey on top of the underpainting but I'll just have to see how things go! I love not having a plan and going with the flow- so to speak!

I will be participating and co-moderating the Etsy Visual Artist Street Team's (VAST) Trunk Show tomorrow night!  Come and take a look and meet new artists with a great range of styles, medium, and prices!

I decided to list a set of 4 natural encaustic medium cakes in my shop as a value pack-- for those that like to buy in bulk!  I always stock up on my art supplies so I'm sure lots of others would, too!

I've been commissioned by a dear old friend of mine to create an oil painting for her.  I'm so excited!  So I've stretched a new canvas and began priming it.  This picture above is of my favorite part of the prep stages-- I always brush on some water to release the sizing in the canvas and watch the water bead up-- I love it!  Then I brush it in really hard and get the canvas nice and taught.  Then I banged it like a drum!  What a great sound.  

The "Hot Mess: Painting with Wax" giveaway has ended and I used Random.org to randomly pick a winner from the blog entries! The lucky post number was #19 which is..... drum roll please!

... Penguen ....

CONGRATULATIONS Penguen!! I'll be contacting you in a couple of minutes to send you your prize! Enjoy!

One more day left for my Encaustic Tutorial Giveaway!!

For the Love of the Bee Etsy sale

During the month of February, the Beeswax Team will be donating 5% of proceeds to the "Save the Bees" research group.

The disappearance of bees on a global scale isn’t an issue to put under the carpet. Considering bees pollinate about 1/3 of everything we eat, when bees begin disappearing, we should do more than watch it happen if we want to protect our food sources.

Please come join us and show your love this Valentine's Day in an unconventional way! 

View our team comic to read more info: http://www.beeswaxteam.com/sale.html