Choices and Decisions …

Creative an image using the encaustic art wax blocks can be a wonderful journey of discovery. It can be exciting to begin, with no idea of what will come from that starting point. It can be a process and a journey, creating and destroying, discovering, imagining, confirming, defining, the verbs and adjectives flow on, just like the molten wax colours.

But the creation of a piece of art, of an image, of an acceptable result, depends on choices and decisions made in the living moments of that creative unfolding. And once the creator is content with what has been created is there yet further opportunity to add more value to the work, to find extra opportunity? Well yes! One way of doing that is to explore options for cropping. And cropping can increase the harvest of imagery from one piece of artwork.

This video shows glimpses of the creation becoming manifest. The blog below explores a few options for cropping. Take a look and see if what I saw is of any value to you, if it does increase the offerings of this image or not. I made choices and decisions.

This is the finished piece; terminated rather randomly by the intrusion of a phone call. But all’s well that ends well. The image created works by itself and came to be titled “on the move”.

You are looking at this on a screen. And you will probably never get to see the actual real wax colours, never touch them or smell them. You are looking at a likeness of the image. And that digital likeness can easily be cropped to new shapes inside most photo editing software. So what can that offer?

The image editing software let’s you highlight the area that will remain after the crop. It is best to duplicate an image before cropping so that you never lose the full original.

Each of the cropped images below could stand alone. If you had never seen the larger final image and only saw the cropped one, you would not miss anything, because the cropped images here are sufficient in themselves to be effective. And so with cropping, this one image has become several.

Look through this collection of crops one at a time. Then you can decide if they do in fact work nicely as a complete image in their own right.

And of course, one great thing you can do with cropping is to take a successful part of a larger image, and cut away the part that is not working, that is not helping. This can either be done on image editing software or it can often be done in real life – cutting and trimming the waxed image down to a smaller format, one which contains the successful part.

This first set of three crops shows nothing of the tree of higher up figures …

This next set of crops includes the tree in all images – starting with a wide focus and then reducing that to concentrate attention on the chosen cropped subjects.

Cropping can be a very useful and helpful process and cropping can increase your image harvest!

Thanks for taking time to look through this blog. I hope it was interesting, even helpful. Mostly though I hope you felt it was worth the time you gave, the attention you put into engaging with this small presentation. And don’t forget that there are loads of blogs that might inspire or help with your encaustic art journeys and explorations.

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.. and if you are interested in working through carefully filmed and explained course exercises then please do look at our course pages.