Category: Encaustic

Finished art, painted with heated wax and other multi-media.

Farewell to Gazes

6″ x 6″ on wallboard

My beloved main toon on the PS EU server, Gazes-at-Shoes, is retiring. Because of technical issues, I no longer play The Elder Scrolls Online on PlayStation, only on PC. She looks somewhat fierce here, but she was always a sweetheart and a joy to game. My new toon wouldn’t be half as fun if I hadn’t learned it all first with Gazes.

No Bonnie waits to take my toy. The digital world, imbued with just as many tea parties and heroic adventures as Andy’s room, isn’t suited for introducing a plaything to the next generation. My first Barbie doll in the early 1970s would look, except for cosmetic differences, like a Barbie of today. Gaming moves too fast, though, for that. Not only do hardware and programming advance, but human reflexes and multi-tasking abilities become more sophisticated. I like the next shiny as much as anyone. Therefore, my girl is gone, an old file in a junked console. The friends I made through her, real people inhabiting a virtual screen, are left behind, too.

Lol, well, this turned into more of an elegy than I expected! Gazes lives in the cloud, so any time I renew my subscriptions and find a PlayStation with the proper software, I can see her again. It won’t happen, though. I’ve moved on.

King Thrushbeard

Not my favorite fairy tale, but I was inspired by the princess carrying food scraps around in jars tied inside her dress pockets.

The wood bead accents are from — shocker — a repurposed piece I never posted here. The plastic dome is something I found at the granddaddy of crafting needs (Hobby Lobby, lol) and added specifically for this idea.

Mum over Hibiscus

Another entry in the Mum series, lol! This is, naturally, a repurpose of this. The original piece, like all of my earlier organic art, dried to dust and faded away. I fear that the photo, with all the rich color, is not what the art looks like on the wall. My small pieces like this show much darker and disappear on display. I’ve found that a great way to appreciate these little morsels is to use the photo as phone or computer wallpaper. The detail is magnified. With my permission, please try it! I’ll let you know when I become famous enough to rescind the offer and charge for the screen grab. Hahaha!

Snow White

Can you recognize this? Haha. This was track art for “Paint It Red“. At the time I loved the use of cheesecloth and red India Ink to illustrate the lyric: when the muslin meets the wine. Also, of course, the stabby theme worked well with this piece, as it looks like blood.

Now it’s repurposed. When I thought of Schneewittchen and the drops of blood on mother’s embroidery frame, this track art piece wanted to lead a double life.

Mum over Lava

Another repurposed piece, this was a screenshot from The Elder Scrolls Online of a volcano overflow near Ebonheart. (The lava still remains as the orange underneath.) It’s another encaustic I never posted because it was nothing special, and then the non-archival print faded with time.

Mum over Sunset

This was a completed piece, a screenshot of an Auridon sunset from The Elder Scrolls Online game. It was so unremarkable I never posted it here. Over time, the color faded. (I don’t use archival papers. Maybe I should reconsider!) Now it’s another repurposed piece. Pink from the sunset, barely fading through at certain points, is all that remains of the original.