I am working on an encaustic and an oil painting this month. The encaustic one- working title- "breathing butterflies" is on the left. The woman in the painting was made by cutting up an old Time Life book- that series has inspired a lot of art from me over the years. There's always one in the thrift store it seems. The woman is cut from a black and white photo of monarch butterflies. I used wax to affix her to the surface. She is totally encased in wax now so the paper is impervious to the elements and won't yellow over time! I want to make it seem like she is exhaling all these butterflies. The background was really fun to do, a lot of scraping and gouging and filling in and then more scraping. I've never made a painting quite like this one before. I'm not sure what else I will do to this one. Something......

My oil painting (on the right) is almost done. It's a manifestation of mother earth. The lighting is bad, sorry, I'll take a "real" picture of it when it's done. It's really colorful. Something I notice while I hike around or even just walk around my neighborhood are all the colors there are in nature. So many subtle variations and striking combinations. I want to celebrate the colors I see in this painting. I worked really hard on the trees. They each have at least 4 or 5 colors in the bark and I painted each leaf individually(!) which took forever. I didn't notice the time going by- it's like a meditation painting those tiny leaves.