The past few days I’ve been frantically decorating journal pages, inspired by some tutorials at Joggles. After the first hesitation I found it very addictive to ruin a perfectly white page by splashing ink, paint or glue on it and watch what happened. And this time NO WAX was involved!

Here is a snapshot of my worktable:

And here are some of the pages. The book is about 5×8″, designed to work mixed media, which means that the paper does not fall apart when you wet it.

Of course the first page gets a crow...;-)

Here I tried a simple drawing of scissors, which were on my table, used a self-cut bee stamp and collaged on the flowers. The lettering is with rub-on letters.

A drawing of an old Japanese ornament, coloured with LuminArte and sprayed with water.

And I finally got back to the Zentangles again!

This is on the back of a page, where the colour bled through. Self-cut stamp + a bit of tangling.

This page turned out pretty by itself! Watered down ink with silk salt added.

In 2011 . . .

Connections
I added approximately 175 new people to my mailing list, gained numerous new followers on Twitter and created a Fan Page on Facebook for TwinLakes Encaustic Art, which has now 171 likes. The Ning community on Encaustic Art grew to more than 900 members, with almost 250 new members since January 2011.

Marketing & Business
In the past year I participated in 11 exhibitions. I sold 21 paintings and got my first commission, which was well received.
New this year was my involvement with the Lake-to-Lake Studio Tour. It forced me to tidy up my studio and present it as small gallery with proper title/price cards. We also had a beautiful flyer printed with details of all the participating studios, and the group created a facebook page and online map. During the summer I had almost 50 people visiting me, which resulted in more names for my mailing list, people signing up for workshops and several cards and paintings sold.

Also new were the Lobby Gallery Sundays at the Penticton Lakeside Resort in the period before Christmas. I was able to rent some display screens to hang my paintings and did demonstrations with the iron. Many people signed up for my mailing list and I sold 4 paintings.

I wrote 53 blog posts, 12 newsletters and 13 Ning broadcasts last year.

Education & Exploration
While at the International Encaustic Artists retreat in Portland last September I attended many talks and demonstrations. I also was chosen President of their new Canadian Chapter CanWax.
One of the highlights of the retreat for me was getting to know Kelly Williams and Bridget Benton. Kelly has worked closely with people struggling with addiction and presented a very personal tale of success. Bridget’s  talk about creativity really blew me away, and she is incredibly funny! I hope to invite both of them to Canada to share their stories.

New resources for me were the online classes by Linda Womack. I signed up for 2 and will certainly take more in the future. I also took dry embossing with Viv and a drawing class with Kindrie. My bookkeeping skills improved and I can now reconcile my own bank and credit card statements.

I learned to inject myself medication and discovered Zentangles, an artful way of doodling.  I even drew some left-handed.  A number of drawings were coated with wax and became part of the Untangled exhibition. Recently I also incorporated them in small paintings in combination with the crow images.

I taught 9 workshops, held one circle meeting, did a demo with local girl scouts, took 2 vegan cooking classes and participated in the 5^th. RipOff Challenge.

During the summer I created a new body of work: the Hills & Trees series, of which many paintings sold this year.

Recognition
My paintings received 1 + 2 place in the art contest of the May issue of Okanagan Artworks.
Okananagan Artworks also published a feature article about me and placed the winning painting on the cover.
In October there was an article in Okanagan Sun about Untangled, my joined show with Bethany Handfield, and Skaha Matters mentioned my studio with a picture.
Being part of the RipOff Artists brought publicity in 3 newspaper articles and hundreds of viewers during the RipOff week and the following display at the Fall Art Show in Oliver.

4 of my paintings were admitted into FCA juried shows; two of them got send to Vancouver.

Miscellaneous
I was able to support Gilda’s Club Simcoe Muskoka with discounts and extras, and I sent extra iron and waxes to The Creative Cocoon, Ontario, an organization which works with seniors.

And one last thing: while doing all of the above I was battling breast cancer with the unwavering support of my fantastic husband and all my dear friends, far and wide.

After the surgery in Oct. 2010, I underwent 5 chemo and 20 radiation treatments and numerous tests in 2011. I lost all of my hair and grew it back again.
Although being ill from the treatments did slow me down a bit, if I now read over what I’ve accomplished this year, I’m very proud of myself.
It was not a bad year after all!

P.S.: Below is an oil portrait of me by Bill Hibberd, which he painted last month. I think he captured very well what this last year has been about for me: life-changing, resulting in a determined optimism…

Thea Haubrich by Bill Hibberd

Instantly the studio space became more attractive to work in, so that was a great added bonus, and I also found several long-lost pieces of art supplies, which were hiding in drawer corners! This was all very stimulating and I think it was one of the reasons why I finished so many paintings this year, despite the crippling chemo treatments.

And folks did come and visit! All in all almost 50! From their names Peter drew one and so Jaine B. from Kelowna will receive one of my recent works on paper:

With all those give-aways I can understand you as blog reader might get a bit envious, so there’s going to be one more present.  If you leave me a comment on my fine art site here, you qualify for the final draw! And this is the little painting:
Good luck!!

Then I had a vision at night of my Zentangle drawings, combined with the crow images and couldn’t wait to try that out. I used 3x4x1.5 cradled wood panels, which were primed with encaustic gesso. The Zentangle drawings were glued on and coated with several layers of medium. The next step was adding the birds, partly transfer, partly painted with wax.

I really liked how they came out and sold all three as soon as I had posted them on Facebook!

Another project which I had put on the back burner was playing with my screen print set again. My profile picture used to be a screen print from an old photo, but now my hairstyle changed, so I’d wanted to get a new profile picture.
This is what I came up with: one of them is now the new profile picture.

As the three small crow paintings sold so fast, I made another three, this time 6x6x1.5″. The middle one has already found a good home! The other ones are available from my fine art site. Just click the image.

The Lobby Gallery at the Penticton Lakeside Resort has come to an end. I attended all 4 Sundays and found it a wonderful opportunity to present my artwork and meet new people.

Thanks again for signing up for my email list. I hope you will enjoy the monthly messages from the “world of wax”!

To express my gratitude I’m giving away one of my paintings. My husband picked a number and the person on my Lobby Gallery list with that number is the winner!

This is the painting (5.5 x 8″). It comes with a 10×12″ mat and is ready to drop into a standard frame.

 And the lucky person is…..Penny K.!

Congratulations, Penny! The painting will be in the mail to you next week!

Merry Christmas

and a Happy, healthy 2012!

Thea

P.S.: I really enjoy giving away stuff, so I’m also going to give away a painting to one of the people who signed my Studio Tour Guestbook this year!

A friend alerted me that www.thepaperplace.ca is giving away  one 8.5×11 sample sheet of each of the over 700 patterns they offer online! Imagine the paintings I could make with those….

I’ve entered their draw; please keep your fingers crossed for me!

So yesterday afternoon 10 intrigued ladies met at Viv’s lovely studio space and threw themselves into making plates and running editions. Viv had prepared a little bag for each of us, containing 4 pieces of sturdy cardboard, 140 lb watercolour paper, 2 pieces of tin and some card making supplies.

We started by making the plates: on the card board we had to create a design with pieces of sandpaper, textured card board, puzzle pieces, metal wire or anything else that could provide texture. I decided to use my beloved crows; this is how my first plate looked:

Plate #1, 2x2"

The next step was to soak a piece of watercolour paper in water, blot off excess liquid and place the plate + the paper into Viv’s press:

This is Viv, demoing the process

Positioning and keeping everything lined up was a challenge and my plate shifted a bit, but I was happy with the embossed image I got:

Finished print, 3 3/4 x 5 1/2"

Below are the 4 plates I made. Aren’t they lovely just on their own?!

The little landscape with the trees came out quite nice as well. The trees are thin metal cut-outs, of which I glued 3 on top of each other give them more of a relief. After printing some got stuck onto the paper and it looked beautiful!
The trees are actually gold-coloured, but I changed the image to black/white to show off the texture better.

Before framing the plates I’m going to try if I can get some good embossed prints with my Cuttlebug, a small press which is used in the stamping business.
And then of course I have to find a way to incorporate some wax in the process….;-))

Detail: We Are Not Alone

At the front of my table I had again displayed one of my latest paintings, We Are Not Alone, this time with a spotlight directed at it.  The light really brought out the textured  surface and the painting got lots of attention. Some people suggested another orientation and we had a lot of fun turning the painting upside down (looked quite good), or sideways, which was less flattering.

She now was an advocate for the victims and shared her story through lectures to make people aware of the wronged indigenous people.

On a lighter note: although I did not sell any paintings yesterday, I had great fun talking to everyone who stopped at my table. Carol brought over several people, who had seen her display, to introduce me to them as “the teacher”.

And at the very end of the show Barb Hofer and I exchanged a painting, so technically we both sold a painting!

Barb Hofer, Similkameen Symphony, 14x18

In exchange Barb took one of my latest Hills & Trees paintings:

Thea Haubrich, Connected, 12x12

The 4 little treasure chests are 7x5x3″ wooden boxes, which I decorated with encaustic. Each one is a painting by itself, don’t you think? I want to sell them at the next Lakeside show. Now, how to price them…??!

Isn’t that nice? I just discovered this slideshow function on wordpress!

Thanks for taking this nice picture, Barb!

Bill Hibberd was there also, painting a portrait of Bethany Handfield. I got some nice shots of him working:

Bill in action, with Bethany sitting unusually quiet...;-))

Very exciting was that I sold 4 paintings today! The first one was an 8×10″ matted work, painted with the iron.

Those Copper Hills

And then a lady bought “Rift”, plus my last two 3×4″ crow paintings!
Actually all of the crow paintings got lots of attention, as did “We Are Not Alone”, which I had displayed at the front of my table, and people could actually touch it. This painting is very textured and I know it is just soooo tempting to run your fingers over it, so I had a little sign saying: “It’s OK to touch the paintings, just don’t scratch them…;-))”

This is “Rift”, a painting I really loved doing and I’m glad it went to such a good home:

Thea Haubrich,Rift, 8x24, encaustic

And here is “We Are Not Alone”:

Thea Haubrich, We Are Not Alone, 16x20, mixed encaustic

Who knows, I might sell it next week…;-))