Lifeboat, completed painting - by Jeff

It's finished! Well, the painting stage is finished. I still have to let it dry, then glue the tiles onto a wooden box. Most of my paintings in the last few years have been coated with encaustic medium as the finishing stage, but this one is going to be coated with Galkyd as a varnish.

As you can see, I opted to use a little creative license with the text on the life boat. The reference photo depicted the name of the ship, but I used my monkey icon and the word "umizaru" in Japanese. It means "sea monkey." It's kind of unusual to see umizaru spelled out in the phonetic hiragana alphabet; you would normally see it as two kanji characters. I like the aesthetics of hiragana. It feels a little more unexpected in context.

The name of the painting is actually "Umizaru 2".