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My beach commission is done and on it’s way to a very happy new owner in Santa Fe, New Mexico! This is Lanikai Beach in Hawaii, where I grew up, and this place holds many fine memories through college and beyond. I posted earlier about finding the perfect color but there’s even more to that story.
The palette in this scene is so vibrant in real life that I turned to a special paint from Enkaustikos in order to capture it. Their interference pigments were new to me, but they were exactly what I needed to get the sand and water just right. Because they are transparent these pigments are influenced by the color of the surface below. Colors mixed with interference medium will change (“flip”) when viewed from different angles. Over a white or light background like the sand, the color is subtle and the “flip” more obvious. Over a black or darker background like the water, the color is more obvious and the “flip” less noticeable.
Using these paints gave me the shimmer I wanted to really make these areas stand out. It’s really tough to photograph the results, so I hope you’ll get to experience it in person sometime.
I thoroughly enjoyed every step of creating this commission! This is one of those paintings I will think of often. I already miss it, so I may just have to make another one for myself.
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Linda Robertson is a painter and the author of the Embracing Encaustic book series. She offers live encaustic workshops in her Portland, Oregon studio as well as online encaustic classes.
I’m so thankful to be a part of this blog hop, and excited to see how everyone creates their own unique art using the materials in the new Linda Robertson Encaustic Set from Enkaustikos! (By the way, some of you may know me as Linda Womack, but it’s Linda Robertson now so please help me spread the word if you would be so kind…)
This set includes lots of encaustic paint and medium in my favorite colors, 4 brushes, a pot of cleaning wax, an 8 x 10 cradled panel, 3 essential tools, a stencil from StencilGirl Products, a pastel from PanPastel Colors and three of my online lessons showing how to use all of the materials together. Here’s a little video to tell you what it’s all about:
BTW, if you are brand new to encaustic you might want to start with my free video overview about encaustic materials (scroll down to “Extra Features”).
I like to practice what I preach in my classes that no board is unsalvageable, especially in encaustic, but this one was NOT looking good. It had colors that didn’t go together and was the product of a demo I did for a very large crowd in Santa Fe last year so it’s safe to say that it was far more spontaneous than planned.
The beauty of salvaging something is that you have those beautiful colors that come through the background and tend to be wonderful surprises.
Many artists who work with wax and stencils together try to get very precise imagery but that’s not always the goal. I decided to do something very loose on this one. This stencil, called Eddy Rose, is from StencilGirl, and was designed by Mary Beth Shaw.
To get this effect I painted the wax through the stencil as usual, but instead of fusing the stencil in place I pulled it up first and then fused it to let the pattern flow with the wax. The result was beautiful!
You can really see the difference in the center photo above, where the top part of the board is fused and the bottom portion is not. I repeated this a couple of times alternating between Zinc White and Super Gold Pearl paint from Enkaustikos which are both included in my set.
