For the quilt that I’m making for my grandmother Halice I chose from my existing stock of encaustic monoprints. When I started cutting up the prints into the required shapes I realized I needed another sheet of the dark print for the large triangles in the middle.

No problem I thought, I’d just make another print and get on with the cutting. I knew that the print on top was R&F’s gorgeous Indigo. The problem was matching the aqua/turquoise under print. I knew it was one of Hylla Evans Paint Sticks but which one?

Problem. I really like blue and apparently I have no self control when it comes to buying encaustic paint:

Blue Hylla Evans Paint Sticks

You think that’s bad you should see my shoe collection…

The real problem is that the paint changes color a bit when heated and I’m printing on cream colored paper, not white so it’s not just a matter of holding the print up against the paint and matching it. Here’s how the Hylla Evans Turquoise looks on the left printed on the Rives BFK Lightweight Cream paper, in paintstick form, printed out under the R&F Indigo, and (on the right) heated and ready to print on the Paula Roland Hot Box:

Turquoise under print, paint and paint on Paula Roland Hot Box

After a few hit or misses I finally got it right.

I worked in IT for 25 years before finally making the (terrifying) move to doing art more or less full time (I still have a part-time day job). Most of that time I was in Project Management and one of the concepts that I was always drawn to in Project Management was Continuous Process Improvement (Total Quality Management – it’s gone by many acronyms) but it’s basically the idea of learning from your mistakes and improving the way you do things going forward – basic palm to forehead stuff but actually remembering it and not doing it again. I like to carry it forward to my daily life as much as possible.

So now, going forward, I write on the back of all my prints the color and the basic technique used in creating each layer:

Documenting Prints

And I wonder why I didn’t think of it before…