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 love when an idea works out better than expected!  I had this image which I pasted down yesterday (see last night's post) and had an idea of what I wanted to do with the officer's bodies but not sure about exactly how to incorporate the background.  The trees are what initially drew me to the image and I knew that I wanted to keep them in.  I wound up painting around them and then chasing after the lines with scraping/carving and drawing them in with charcoal.  

This painting, along with 1 or 2 more, will be submitted to a gallery show called "White, Black, & Shades of Gray."  I'm glad that I decided to do this and challenge myself by taking the "color" out.  Of course, I still mixed actual colors into the painting to give it depth.  Can't wait to get paint on the next board!  Hope this makes it into the show.  Wish me luck!

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Ghosts of the Past #4
Encaustic, Photograph, & Charcoal on Cradled Birch
12" x 12" (30.48 cm x 30.48 cm)
January 2009

Not currently for sale, please inquire if interested.
(click inage to zoom)
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