Sea Creatures

Holy Mackeral
encaustic and paper on birch panel 5x5

 I was playing around with the creatures of the sea today.  I'm using some of the colors that came about in my Colors of the Sea palette from Tuesday (here).  And... why am I thinking of the Sea?  Its the theme that we have chosen for the IM (Ingrid-Marji) project. 
I got the idea from seeing black and white photos printed on old book pages.  I just happened to have some old book pages and sheet music so I gave it a try.  I used a photo of a sand dollar and in Photo Shop I extracted the background and isolated the sand dollar.  Then, I ran the book pages and sheet music through the printer in the auto feed tray, printing the sand dollar photo.  They turned out OK... just OK.  It was actually harder than I thought to get a good printing where the photo wasn't too dark or too light - both resulting in lost detail.  However, they seemed like good backgrounds for encaustic paintings.  I used this method to mount the paper on the panels. When the wax hits the paper, the paper becomes more translucent depending on, of course, the paper used.  So my prints lost some of their umph on both of these papers and, anything on the reverse side slightly showed through.  But, as we all know, all is good in art... there really are no mistakes. 

Maestro
encaustic and paper on birch panel 5x5

I've decided from these two small paintings.. that it would be really kinda fun to try some sea creatures in a larger format.   It made it fun to use my Punchy Sea Color Palette - a little shell green, sea grass yellow, crab and scallop shell.
I'm hooking up with Paint Party Friday today.  I want to say thank you to all of the PPF people who dropped by last week.  I have to say I was impressed by the wonderful enthusiasm everyone shared and the outstanding artwork created by this group.  I felt very welcome for my first ever PPF and I am so looking forward making my way around to see what everyone else is doing.   Thank you again everyone and Happy PPF!!