Recent encaustics

I spent Wednesday afternoon in the garage working on some encaustics. This first piece is something I've been working on for a while...I'll add something and hate it so I remove it. The only thing consistent was the blue ground (which you can now only see through the photo) and the photo. I actually broke into the color wax I've had squirreled away (I found a $20 electric griddle that seems to work well) and tried to lay in some color to the surface. I think the transfers show up really well over the color (the map is a sailing route in the South Pole and the circle is some sort of medieval distorted view of the world as 6 spheres). I'm not sure what it means yet but there's something about journeys and identity in there.

With the next piece, I drew with charcoal directly on the board and then applied the medium on top of it, hence the smearing. I then framed it with the reddish brown and applied metallic watercolor to the surface. Unsure about meaning with this one either...knots? Being bound up? Charcoal squiggles? I like the look of the smeared charcoal so I think I'll play around with that some more.

This last piece is just a first step. I was listening to a story on the CBC about flying squid and went looking for pictures of squids in flight. I found a photo of one in the air (about 1 foot off the water from what I could tell) and messed with it in Photoshop to turn it into a black & white line-drawing-like figure. I then transferred it directly onto the board using nail polish remover (ugh! don't get me started on how nasty that stuff smells). I then applied a layer of medium and a thin layer of the metallic watercolor. Not sure where I'm going from here, but it definitely needs color.

Flying squid