I wish all my obsessions were this much fun. Tulips. After the winter we’ve had, I do believe if I were alive in the 16h century I’d have paid my yearly salary for a tulip bulb. It was a financial bubble, of course, (it really happened) but obsessions aren’t logical.
But, thankfully, I live in this century and I go to the supermarket to get flowers.
This is a short video on a photograph of a tulip arrangement that I had photographed against a white background and then used a variety of textures and plug-ins, NIK and Topaz Impressions being the most prominent.
Then, I did a wet photo transfer on to a large board (usually I used the exact dimensions of the photograph) with the intent I was going to get to know pan pastels and whether I think they could add to my photograph.
As it turns out, I am beginning to “see” that the encaustic process ,which begins for me with my already textured photograph, can be the equivalent of a new paintbrush, or indeed a new plugin (would that they had an encaustic plug in!) when used with a combination of photo transfer, medium, and paints. In this case, I used pan pastels thinking that their wide spectrum of hue and softness would fit the photograph better than oil pastels or oil sticks. I think I was right about that, btw. Ha! I can be right sometimes!
In another lifetime, I’d experiment with the same photograph with the other paints as well. But, I think I’ll take the original photograph and transform it in to a black and white sketch or colored pencil sketch in Topaz Impressions and then print it out with the idea to use watercolors and then another with pan pastels without medium. Stay tuned.
I look forward to trying all possible and impossible things to try and express my version of tulip mania this spring 2015!
