Nancy’s eCourse: If you follow my blog you know I’ve been taking an eCourse taught by Nancy Crawford. Her course includes design, encaustic prep work and techniques. In particular she wanted us to demonstration encaustic accretion,incising, color field, and gold leaf application. She chose to use the Golden Ratio, sometimes called the Fibonacci curve, as a starting point. Her final design is shown below on the left.
Variations on the theme: I was more interested in pulling the shapes apart and soon had a sketchbook page of variations on Nancy’s design (middle picture), but as I experimented I realized that I wanted to demonstrate the lessons in an obvious way which led me to the design you see above. I found this whole process to be a demonstration that I can use a sketchbook but that I am more likely to work hands on with paper and cameras and then extened the work in Photoshop.
Finished piece: Normally I work abstractly but as I began this piece I realized the imagery was too familiar to ignore. Nopales are tasty cactus pads that you can often find in your grocery (bottom photo right). I grew up in Tucson but even here in Columbus I can order them in Mexican restaurants. Hey, margaritas tonight!
