Encaustics Poster

It was sunny when I went to my digital art class yesterday at 1. But it was drizzling slightly when I got out. There was a big hole in the sky. And now, it's snowing.




We're moving on from our 'fantasy' pictures where we take four photos and merge them into one picture. Mine is taking longer than I thought, partly because I'm using way more than four different photos. Getting the light to match in each of the merged pictures may be beyond my ability before it's due.

But yesterday we started and finished a new project - focusing on text. Prof. Gonzales' assignment was to go downstairs to the bulletin board in the Art building and find a poster. Then we were supposed to redo the poster so the text and graphics were better. I chose the white one with all the text and one picture on the lower left before the lighter panel.

It's for an Encaustics workshop. I never heard of Encaustics either. So I turned to the web. There were a couple of great descriptions of how to create the encaustics materials on a site called wet canvas (and wet canvas2) but I had to look further for a definition which I got on jocelynaudette:

Encaustic paintings are painted with beeswax, resin, and pigment. It is an ancient process that was used by the Egyptians and Greeks, and examples have been found in Egyptian tombs. Generally, the painting process involves using a hot palette to melt and mix the colored wax, painting it onto the panel using a brush, and fusing the layers with a heat gun. All paintings are on wood panels which provide a rigid and supportive surface. (Like always you can double click to enlarge the pictures.)

So, here's the original poster. It has a lot of details about the class, about cost, discounts, times, places, etc. but it isn't very eye catching. It seemed to me that a poster for an art workshop ought to be somewhat artistic itself. So I googled encaustics images and there were plenty. The workshop poster talks about collage too, so I figured I should have a collage like poster. And as much should be visual as possible. So I got the seven people - all from different encaustics work on line - that was the maximum class size. I found an encaustics picture I could use as the base of the poster - one that had a fair amount of white space I could fill in. The flag is a Jasper Johns encaustic. And the beeswax had to go somewhere since it is the basis of encaustics as I understand it.

I had to leave out a lot of the text, so I put the contact information in a prominent place. We were supposed to then take our printed posters and pin them up next to the old ones. But yellow wasn't working on the printer, so it should get done Wednesday. Fortunately we were supposed to get this done in the 45 minutes left of class so it was 'done' when the time limit was up and I don't have to agonize over it to make it perfect.

These workshops were over in September, but I guess if you're interested you could still go to the website and see if new ones are planned.