rachel rivas-plata

Influential Artists Part 3: Essence of Mulranny

Education, Inspiration, Motivation, Portfolio, Process / By wolfpupstudio@gmail.com

(posted 01/11/2025)

We’ve all heard or even know that art is a journey, not a destination. For me it’s about immersing myself in the process – exploring, experimenting, and expressing. In 2021 I signed up for the Essence of Mulranny Painting with Fire nine-month series. I cannot praise this set of courses enough, and I have only purchased one year of them.

Essence of Mulranny Arts linked here is an art studio and classroom located in (as their site says) “sheep country” of Ireland. (In case you’re wondering, I’m not being paid to write any of this. I currently do not have any endorsements or monetize my web site. All my business income is from art sales.) I did not travel to Ireland, but I purchased the Painting with Fire video courses in April of 2021 and found a few favorite instructors: Elise Wagner, Pamela Caughey, Ezschwan Winding, and Lyn Belisle.

Elise Wagner has a very interesting background in collagraph printmaking and has used encaustic wax surfaces as the basis for prints, which I find very fascinating. I kept her techniques in mind when working on pieces where the texture is a focal point, like my encaustic painting below, “Beyond.”

Ezschwan Winding taught me how to approach a portrait and after watching her course, I ended up making the following piece, “Heavy,” which was accepted into the Lakeland May Show a couple years ago.

Abstract encaustic master Pamela Caughey’s course was my inspiration to make the Waterfall series. They were created all at once by first binding all the canvases together. The photo below shows them right after they were separated.

And Lyn Belisle’s course highlighting faux surfaces made me experiment further with metallic powder pastels in my work. I love when I can make beeswax look like burnished metal, such as the following piece, “Straw Into Gold.”

The handful of courses I have viewed have been so enriching to me that I have yet to finish watching all of them. They never expire, so that has been a huge benefit as well. I better catch up because more courses have been released every year since 2021!

I’ll always be striving to learn more. Looking back, it’s satisfying for me to see how I’ve learned from many sources and forged my own unique path with encaustic medium.

Influential Artists Part 1: Alicia Tormey

Education, Inspiration, Process / By wolfpupstudio@gmail.com

(posted 07/05/2024)

Occasionally people ask if I teach encaustic – currently I do not, but wouldn’t turn down a request for a demonstration of my own techniques. This is the first of a series of blogs where I will highlight why I found each of my online teachers so influential. First up has to be Alicia Tormey. As you can see from her web site linked here, she’s a knowledgeable encaustic artist who currently provides several resources and courses to artists.

I discovered Alicia on Instagram years ago after I had followed just about every encaustic artist who appeared in my “encaustic art” Google alert. At the time she was doing a Q&A series every Tuesday where she shared her experience and answered questions not only about encaustic but also regarding the business of art. Watching her invaluable live streams helped me understand various techniques, how to care for encaustic, and how to present my work. She’s simply an amazing teacher with the utmost business sense.

In my early years of working with encaustic medium, I religiously watched her posts every Tuesday and took her Learn to Burn course. She pioneered the shellac burning process herself decades ago. People love her vibrant, bursting florals, but I’m more enamored with her vast, ethereal landscapes. Her ability to make an abstract image have realistic properties has me in awe.

Here is one older piece I did that shows the shellac burning techniques I learned in her class. I haven’t gone too far in that direction with shellac (yet), but I still have my Bernzomatic torch on standby for when the mood strikes.

“Renaissance” by Rachel Rivas-Plata, 8×10 in. Encaustic Mixed Media (SOLD)

AI Meets Encaustic, Part III

Inspiration, Midjourney Images, Process, Uncategorized / By wolfpupstudio@gmail.com

(posted 05/14/2023)

If you have followed me at all lately, you can tell I am having a lot of fun working with the AI system called Midjourney. I’ve “conjured” well over 200 images using it. I’ve had it create patterns, botanicals, landscapes, round images, abstract art, portraits, and the list goes on. Quantity over quality is definitely where I’m at in the process. I have experimented enough to find a niche of a certain style that feels right, for now.

Painting with words is how I can best describe the process. You type in descriptive words on your own or copy those of the art pieces you like – they are constantly being produced by other subscribers out of the general system. Most of what I see on Midjourney when I scroll through other artists’ work has a futuristic/science fiction look similar to the first one below, but I do my best to avoid those results because my goal is to be unique of course. Overall, Midjourney is to an artist a brilliant way to quickly draft an image of a piece one is thinking of, but can be frustrating when the words aren’t interpreted the same way by AI.

Midjourney Images

What makes AI fun, but like a roller coaster, is the rapid pace at which I can create images. But, to make art that truly represents my purpose and aesthetic has taken me a very long time and quite a few errors. I’m excited to continue to share what I’ve conjured using AI. The work I’ve done lately has a strong visual presence. I don’t like these enough to use them in my encaustic, but they’re quite appealing and show yet another avenue of my individual creativity.

Midjourney Images

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