pixabay

(posted 2/21/2021)

The site Pixabay has copyright-free images which you are allowed to download for free and use as you like. I often use their images as inspiration photos or digital pieces of my collage works. But, we need to step back a bit further. I was browsing Instagram one day and came upon someone’s post of art from Nineteenth Century French painter, Odilon Redon. In particular, his work called “Sailing Boat with Two Passengers,” which you can see by clicking this link. It was a colorfully moody, dark painting with a mixture of jewel tones and pastels. I decided to use the Redon painting as inspiration for my own colorful encaustic sailboat painting. I found this photo on Pixabay (linked here) to use as a reference and began to get to work. Maybe picking a monotone image to was my first mistake! Stay tuned …

I began with a titanium white pigmented encaustic medium layer, then added some black and blue R&F encaustic paint toned down with some other blue color mixes I had on hand. Here’s the first process photo.

Have I mentioned how difficult it is to paint with beeswax? I keep it warm on my hijacked pancake griddle so it’s constantly in liquid form, but when I brush it on the surface, I only have seconds to get it where I want it. The up side is that if I don’t like it, I can scrape it off or cover it with another color. The down side is that I don’t have much control over it, and I tend to want to work more quickly rather than deliberately which trips me up every time. Planning is key when working in encaustic! If I don’t have a good plan and experience with what I’m trying to do, things can start spiraling rather quickly, as you will see …

This next process photo above was saved only by the adorable aussiedoodle paw photobomb. Bijou saves the day! The pock marks all over the canvas are from the air flow in my studio. At this point, the window was wide open in the middle of February because of the built up fumes since I had been working on this for a couple hours. As you can see, I had added color with PanPastels, but it just wasn’t cohesive. I tried to save it by going in with more PanPastels, wiping it off, then even scraping with a sharp tool. This next photo shows the downward spiral continuing. *CRINGE*

But wait, it gets worse! The next photo shows the damage an artist can do with sharp objects when she is backed into a corner. I feel as though this needs a flashing “GRAPHIC CONTENT” warning …

Thankfully, at this point I jumped ship (sorry for the pun!) and scraped it all off and began at the new beginning.

This sailboat 2.0 above became a larger focus of the painting, as Redon had done. I liked this version much better, but I still felt as though it needed more bold colors in order to capture the emotive energy in Redon’s painting. Today, I went in again with PanPastels and added final touches. I think the end product is a bit more cohesive and definitely emits the colorful vibe I wanted from the very start.

I ended up gifting the painting to my husband because he loves it and says he wants to buy a sailboat “someday.” Now he has one 😉

The End