I am building up a palette of textured colors from photographs and existing art pieces. The process is engaging, fast, and just a lot of fun.
In this collage (left), I was looking for yellow-orange, and combed through my images for anything that brought that cheery color to mind.

Through various combination effects of the layers below, I created a popping color field that abstracts the sense of flowers and bright spring.

The first layer in this creation (right) is a combination of two of my existing travel pieces, Travel 1 and Travel 2. I like the composition of these pieces individually, but also really liked what happened when I combined them together.

The next layer (left) added in a combination from another existing piece, Lobby. I wanted just the yellow parts, but needed a full image, so I recombined these selections of the encaustic piece.

One more scan through my existing pieces found me these sections of a matte medium collage, Gentlemen(right). I really didn’t have enough to fill up the field this time, but thought the bands of color might add an interesting effect.

Finally, I turned to nature. These small flowers (left) had just fallen from a fruit tree in our yard and had a faint orange tinge, plus great texture.

The main color effect comes from these California poppies (right), the essential hue for a yellow-orange composition. I combined the same image several times to fill the field.

As a topper, I also included smaller bursts of color (left) to add texture.

Each piece is evident in the whole effect, above, and yet becomes a very new, and standalone color field that I can use to build up my digital collages.