At first, Colorado Springs artist Shannon Mello wanted to create 50 organically-shaped encaustic pieces made from plywood.

When those were finished, she thought, “This will not do,” and increased the number to 100. And then it became 150, and finally 200.

All 200 pieces of her 18-month-long project will cover four walls of Auric Gallery in her new exhibit, “What I Pick Up Along the Way.” It opens with a free reception from 5-8 p.m. during the First Friday downtown event.

“I enjoy laborious work, so I love power tools,” said Mello, who’s also a painter. “I love the sanding. I love woodworking. And I wanted to have this exhibit not be a small thing.”

The gallery will also feature encaustic works by Michele Ledoux; “Emergence” by Sonal Kamalia; and “Release” by Kristopher Orr through April.

Mello’s new works, ranging in size from three to 24 inches, represent worn stones, weathered by the land or water. The title of her exhibit is a throwback to childhood, when she and her family would search for Petoskey stones along Lake Michigan and Lake Huron in Michigan. The fossilized coral looks like “miniature fireworks,” she says.

That love for geology sneaked its way into her own family.

“My family is all geology geeks. We’ve collected stones from lots of places we’ve been as memory trinkets,” Mello said. “We keep them outside. We don’t want to remove them from the earth. We always look at the layers, the colors, the compositions. It lends itself to encaustic, which is also built on layers.”

Encaustic painting, also known as hot wax painting, uses a mixture of melted beeswax and damar resin to which pigment is added.

To create her works, Mello started with plywood, some of which was Baltic birch, and cut it into basic square and rectangular shapes with a circular saw. She glued two pieces together, sketched her desired shapes on the wood, and used a jigsaw to cut the shape and sand its edges. Then she painted eight to 20 encaustic layers on each piece in colors inspired by earth elements — rusted oranges, yellows and purples — and embedded gold leaf in many of them.

“Each piece becomes a small, self-contained landscape — something held rather than framed, encountered rather than explained,” Mello writes in her artist statement.

Mello learned to work with encaustic painting in 2018, when she was still an arts teacher at Mountain Ridge Middle School. She got hooked on the medium and what it taught her.

“You really need to surrender to imperfections,” she said. “It gets you out of this robotic, everything needs to be perfect mode, and drops you into an environment where you need to accept the outcome. It’s never going to turn out the way you want, but it usually ends up surprising you in a wonderful way.”

If you go

What: “What I Pick Up Along the Way” by Shannon Mello; encaustic works by Michele Ledoux; “Emergence” by Sonal Kamalia; “Release” by Kristopher Orr

When: Opening reception 5-8 p.m. Friday, runs through April

Where: Auric Gallery, 125 E. Boulder St.

Price: Free; auricgallery.com