Prep for a new series (and sneak preview of lion)

Hi There  !  Another Saturday here in Sydney, bright sunshine, but a tad chilly as the light faded and it became dark.  Soon it will be our shortest day of the year, so the days are not so long right now.

In between work on the verdigris lion, I have been getting a set of art boards ready to do my next series of encaustics painting.  I will work on two to three dozen paintings in the next run.  I am making the art boards myself, out of MDF and attaching timber

 backframing of pine or maple (or sometimes tassie oak).  The timber is not so important, as the three sorts all cost about the same.  Ian has made up a "jig" in his workshop and cuts the pieces to size and I attach them with a high quality woodworkers PVAplus glue.  Attaching the back frames is a fiddly job.  But as a task, it is a bit mindless and a good break from the lion--I can study him while I am working on attaching the frames.

Above right you can see a pile of art boards with timber backframes attached.  The art boards I am making are 10 x 10 cm, 20 x 20 cm and 10 x 30 cm sized.   In front of the small artboards in the photo are several half kilo blocks of beeswax.  I will be melting these down  for my painting and will add oil paint for pigment and then also some splashes of resin (damar varnish and also pure gum turps) to help it harden up to a nice finish.  

At left is a small set of encaustics paintings I painted last November.  They were just sitting on a table, looking nice and wanting a better purpose for their existence.  So, I have now attached them to a single set of backframing, the three 8 x 8 cm paintings are now joined together in the back by timber and make a nice little artwork of 8 x 24 cm size.  I like how they look together.  The middle one had a background that did not "go" so well with the top and bottom ones, so I put a fab deep blue green turquoise color oil paint on the middle one and have rubbed it back to expose the white feather design.  I am happy with how it looks as a collection now.   I am dubbing this Feather Study. 

I have not yet decided what I am going to paint in the new series !  I have another day to contemplate this, as I did not finish the lion today, so will be working on him again tomorrow.  Very close on him...most of the lion is done, but then I was working on the background and it took longer than I thought.  It is looking better though, big improvement on its previous look.  There is some clean up to do of a few parts of the background, before I can declare the painting complete.  This is so typical at this stage.  So much for thinking this painting would be done today !  Perhaps tomorrow then ?!

Just in case you wonder how the lion has progressed today....ok, ok, here he is.   Does he look almost or nearly done yet ?  Stay tuned for next post--I just have to get Mr Lion done and ready to glaze !