These paintings have almost painted themselves these last few days. These bright greens and blues, very optimistic colors, have taken over my pallet. The titles are Sing a song, Crossing our tails, Bird and seahorse, and I forget what I called the green bird. Look for them on my website by the end of the week. I will have the title then.
There's nothing like starting a painting. It's all possibility. The more you add the more committed you become. For these paintings I started painted some rice paper with gouache and watercolor, then drew on it with pen and cut the shapes out. I used clear encaustic to fuse them to the panel's surface. Now the fun begins!
As some of you may know, I have been on a pretty intense encaustic kick for the past few years. At the outset of my experimentations with encaustic painting, I wondered if the change in medium would affect my oil paintings. I am now beginning a project to find out. Since I started with encaustics, I have done a few oil paintings here and there but now I will delve back into oils more fully with a new series. Above is one of the first of this new group- I just completed this diptych on Saturday and haven't named it yet. I have been doing a lot of birds with radiating eyes, and other starburst archetypes. My figures seem the same as they ever were, but some of the colors seem brighter, some of the linework seems more defined- this could have been the influence of the encaustics. 
And here are my beautiful daylillies. I love seeing the bright colors all over the yard. It's a shame that they only last a day, but kind of cool that the placement of the flowers is re arranged on a daily basis.
This building will probably end up in one of my paintings very soon.
The lines you can make with encaustic paint are really cool. They hover above your painting, encased in clear encaustic wax. The process is this- put a few layers of clear wax where you want to make lines. Then incise your lines using something sharp. I use a clay carving tool. Then, using a brush loaded with the colored wax that you intend for your line, force the wax into the incisions. Once the wax has cooled a little use a scraping tool to scrape off the extra colored wax, and viola, you have your line!
I like encaustic. It's hard to control and doesn't always do what you think it will. But painting with it makes you use another side of your brain because the process is so different. Painting with a brush, you can't get a lot of precise work done because that's slow painting. If the brush in your hand hovers above your surface for any minute amount of time, your encaustic paint will dry and will not transfer from brush to board. This is especially true when you are using a smaller brush trying to do detail work. Everyone knows I love doing precise details. It satisfies the OCD part of my brain. I love that as messy and unpredictable as encaustic paint can be, you can still make it very precise by using stencils. I got into cutting snowflakes a few years back. I love symmetry and pattern. This skill has really helped me in cutting the tiny stencils you see above. Each one is about an inch and a half. After I painted the stencils, I coated them with clear to protect all the details. Then I started making birds, because I love birds and I am on a bird kick right now. This is the smallest of the three diptychs I am working on right now. 
Here is how the 1rst 
diptych is ending up. The left panel is oil on canvas, the right panel is oil and encaustic on panel. I love the idiosyncrasy of the two panels. They line up enough, but not totally. I also wanted each to stand on its own, so the painting can be displayed with panels flush or separated. 
I thought I'd try a diptych after finishing my Owl triptych The King and Queen. (a photo of this painting will be on my site early next week.)
Monoprints! Well, actually monotypes.... Here are some of the prints that came out of the monoprint class I just finished teaching. There are a lot of different techniques involved, but basically monoprinting is painting on a plexiglass and then running it through the press. You can do multiple passes through the press to create layers, or do just one pass. Jessica Moore used an image from a book to inspire her chair print. Tara Nelson was able to get a lot of color variation and smooth color transitions using a brayer to create her abstract prints. Debbie Hicks uses the textures from lace, fabric and plant life in her layered prints. Mark Healy used the brayer and the subtractive technique to create this helicopter image. 