Sunflower Valley : Presented Mounted and Photographed

Original Art in hot wax : Sunflowers

I have just finished this piece featuring a valley of sunflowers.

I worked in hot wax on a A3 gloss card painting using my hot iron and stylus tools together with a heat gun for remelting the wax once applied.

I have been painting a lot of Sunflowers of late, and this piece took about 10 hours in several sessions for me to get to where I wanted to be. I used to find I liked to finish a painting in one or two sessions but I have changed the way I work now and often feel coming back to a piece after a few hours or days break I can see how to develop the picture, and as encaustic wax is so versatile I can easily remelt and rework the piece until I am happy with the work.

Photographing Art Work

It can be a challenge photographing artwork to show online. I find that with my wax art it can be difficult to show the subtlety of the work as when displayed on a computer screen lines in the wax which add a great texture in real life can look clumsy when photographed. Likewise the colours and the sheen, although they do show, often have much more depth than represented in online screen view.

Presenting and showing artwork online

It is also, at times, difficult to know how to present the paintings, I sometimes use a display easel to demonstrate how a painting could be displayed or a frame, which can help show how a piece maybe used. But this doesn’t always give the true feeling of size.

When we photographed the “Splash of colour – flower meadow” paintings this week I decided to hold the pictures to give a perspective to the size. I had a fellow artist comment on how effective this was and so again with this painting I am showing it in relationship to its surroundings and me holding it.

This picture is approx. 16 x 11 in size and the mount in a mid to dark blue really highlights the golden yellows of the Sunflower subject I feel.

What do you think?

What do you think?
Why not leave me a blog comment below.

Hot Wax Demonstration : Sunflower

Encaustic Art

Wax is a wonderful medium to work in and it is my passion as an Encaustic artist to create pictures using this versatile medium.

Following on from the launch last month of the new Art In Wax Sunflower exhibition, a collection of 6 paintings all painted in hot wax. Adrian and I created a video diary of me painting some of the pictures in this new collection of A4 sized pictures and a short demonstration of a smaller postcard size sunflower to accompany the exhibit, these are now live on the Art In Wax Youtube channel.

Hot Wax Sunflower Painting

A new more detailed demonstration

In addition we have now created a further film of me painting another postcard size Sunflower. This film is more close up and gives a more detailed view of the technique of working with the heated stylus tool.

Encaustic wax and tools used

In this demonstration I used :

• Stylus Tool with the mirco nib.
• Stylus Tool with a metal brush nib.
• A limited palette of 4 coloured Encaustic wax blocks : Green, Yellow, Orange and Brown.
• A6 Encaustic gloss card

The demonstration can be viewed below or via the Art In Wax Youtube channel How to paint a sunflower.

If you would like to, please leave me a comment to let me know if you watched the film and what you thought.

Sunflower Exhibit

Encaustic Art Exhibit : Sunflower Collection

This week see a new exhibition published on the Art In Wax website. The theme of this exhibit is one of my favorite flowers – Sunflowers.

Sunflower Exhibition

I recently bought a bouquet of sunflowers and had taken photographs to paint from, I don’t tend to look at the photographs while I am painting. I make sketches from the pictures and then using these sketches to look at as a guide to placing the blooms and depth of the picture I paint the flowers directly with the wax onto the gloss card.

This process of working gives an impressionistic feel to the paintings as much of the painting come from my imagination as I work with the hot wax. I am showing some of the photographs in the exhibit, these demonstrate the collection is based more on the similarities in the photographs rather than actual copies.

The exhibits page has six of the sunflower paintings I have created for this online exhibition : Sunflowers Art In Wax

Famous Sunflowers

Throughout time sunflowers have been a popular subject for painters and artists.

One of the most famous being that of Vincent van Gogh and his vase of sunflowers. Bouquet of Sunflowers by Claude Monet in 1881 an oil on canvas paintings is one of my own personal favorites and “Three Sunflowers And A Bottle of Water” 1996 by David Hockney has such a different and yet vibrancy I just had to mention it too.

Fun to paint

This series of paintings was great fun to paint and has taken several weeks to complete, I used various tools in the process. All pictures are approximately A4 (29 x 21 cm) in size and create on encaustic gloss card using encaustic coloured wax.

Video diary

Whilst painting this collection I have made a short video diary showing some of the techniques use in the process ……..

You can watch this and a demonstration of me painting a smaller hot wax encaustic sunflower via the Art In Wax Youtube Channel or below in this blog post.

Please leave me a comment if you liked the exhibit and /or the video diary.

Paintings from this series maybe for sale, please contact me Hazel Rayfield direct for details.

New Painting : Sunflowers

Hot Wax Painting : Golden Sunflowers

I have painted Sunflowers over the past year several times, they are a favourite flower of mine, I love the way they are tall and majestic, standing proud in gardens and fields.

This is a new painting, created over the last weekend, where as in the past some of my paintings have taken me no time at all, I now take time over them and can spend several hours on a piece like this taking me over a few days to complete.

The sunflowers have been painted using a limited palette of orange, yellow and brown waxes, with some white and black for the highlights and centre. The encaustic iron was the main tool used in creating the picture with some stylus work for the detailing as this is a larger piece at 16 x 12.

Many of the paintings on the Art In Wax are for sale, please contact me for details if you see a painting you are interested it buying.