Southwest Herd of 3

This herd is available as encaustic prints and notecards.

The first of my encaustic stencilled herd creations is now available for sale on my website in large/small print and notecard formats. (The copyright notice in the picture above does not appear on the finished products.) This herd of three different horses charges at you wearing beautiful American Southwest colors of teal, green, brown, orange, and gold.

Creating this work required the following steps.

• One horse was drawn onto white mat board and simplified into a stencil format.
• The stencil design was cut out of the mat board with an Exacto knife.
• The resulting stencil was photographed with a black background to create a black horse image on a white background.
• The image was transferred to my computer where it was converted into a solid white background with a transarent horse, just like the physical stencil.
• A colorful encaustic pattern was created on a large sheet of encaustic card stock using my large hot plate, hot air tool, and various encaustic waxes.
• The pattern was then photographed and transferred to my computer.
• The digital pattern was placed behind the digital horse stencil on my computer.
• The white background was made transparent, so only the encaustic pattern appeared where the horse’s body was.
• This process was repeated using two additional drawings of horses in different poses.
• The three resultant digital patterned horses were combined in one document, enlarging/reducing and flipping them horizontally as necessary to create my final herd in this Southwest design.

Each horse was lovingly rendered as a separate unit, so the patterns composing each horse’s body would decrease logically in size as the horses were positioned farther away in the herd.

As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, I’ve already created a total of five horse stencils. I have also created several different encaustic patterns to place behind these stencils.  My next task will be to photograph and substitute these new backgrounds behind the five digital horse stencils I’ve created, then combine them on my computer into more herds and/or single horses. I’m greatly looking forward to this process, which should proceed more quickly, now that I’ve learned the most efficient ways to manipulate the images on my computer.

Due to the elaborate process required to create these herds, they can only be created as open edition prints, rather than as encaustic originals. I’m excited by simplicity of the designs and the rich colors the encaustics create in these prints. I hope you will be, too! What do you think of my first herd?