Good Habits for the New Year

I do believe that if you allow yourself to pay attention, that helpful suggestions or themes will manifest themselves and even repeat in your life.  In this sense it seems lately that the Universe has been suggesting I reevaluate my relationship with my artwork and mend our differences.  Not an easy task.  I have begun by establishing a sort of morning constitutional with the drawing board, a pot of coffee and the Beirut Pandora station.  It's been good so far.

One snag I have not been able to figure out is the encaustic studio issue (ample ventilation, something not possible in my apartment setting).  To keep forward motion I have been attempting to gain the effect of encaustic layers through other mediums.  The experiment today was acetate and vellum, which was a learning curve but ultimately successful. 

charcoal and acrylic on vellum

So this was a doodle on vellum (fyi: the difference between the two is vellum is opaque while acetate is transparent).  I enjoyed the painting, but didn't like that the loose vellum was wrinkling drastically.  So I stuck it on my acrylic painting on top of an acetate layer.  (And I did paint it a bit pinker.)

acrylic, charcoal, acetate, vellum, not finished!

This is beginning to look like something I'm pretty excited about.  A lot of the detail work and the shine from the acetate gets lost on the blog of course, but for lack of a studio/studio-mates to share it with this will have to do.  I ultimately want layers of line work in these pieces.  This has been an intriguing method to achieve a degree of this goal.

Also today I worked on #2 from my last post.  Now this particular painting has been pissing me off every time I looked at it, I was very unhappy with it.  I mentioned it to a friend of mine who commented that it was surprising I was even trying for abstract.  That's when the lightbulb went off and I threw that goal out the window.  I re-attacked #2, and now it's something I can be much more proud of.  Not done, but it looks waaay better:

I have no idea why these shapes keep reappearing with me, but I love them.  This still needs a few more hours of work, and the colors are a bit sickly in this picture, but I am so happy to have this appearing here to show progress from earlier.  Looking forward to where these pieces will end up.