This week has been more of the same, like I thought it would be. Watching lots of YouTube has shown me that my screen printing setup is less than rudimentary, but I’ll be rocking the extreme DIY version for a while yet.
It also gave me an idea for a niche video channel that I’ll never get around to starting though, so at least my brain’s been sufficiently agitated.
Distracted by typography
This actually happens at least a handful of times every year. This time it started because I’ve been designing a typeface to print onto a t-shirt for my son – but I only need some punctuation marks, so maybe “designing a typeface” is hyping that up a bit.
Still, it was enough to give me the bug again and this time I’ve actually been playing around with FontStruct and Calligraphr, which do let you design your own typeface. I’ve got a few on the go, but in the middle of working on one I realised it would be a lot more work than I can spare right now.
Maybe they’ll appear as prints later in the year. I dunno.
Yes, that’s a card wedged in the living room coving.
The world of playing cards
This is entirely new to me, but thanks to my son I’ve truly been enlightened. He’s into throwing cards at the moment so he’s after a few different decks, but I’ve been bowled over by the absolutely beautifully designed decks out there. Even the boxes are sometimes marvels of product design.
The other side of this interest is finding cards everywhere. Everywhere.
I was going to share a few of the wackier ones I came up with but I haven’t decided whether I’m actually ready to let them go! Well, that is kinda the point of hoarding, but I don’t know if I’m prepared to spend my money on odd domains instead of art supplies.
I was thinking about justifying it by setting up a new site for some of my wonky design efforts and random finds, but I have so many sites on the go even now that I backed down from that precipice pretty quickly.
Next week?
I’m a lot more mobile than I was even two days ago, so I’m hopeful to have more studio developments to share, with more photographs.
I’ve also decided that I really should come up with a name for my little studio mate. Egbert maybe? Any thoughts?
For the first full week of 2019, I’ve been sitting still. It’s been boring.
Thanks to a minor operation in the last week of 2018 I’ve had to basically do nothing but rest, cutting my latest project in half. Up until the last minute I had been developing and testing my first banknote (part of the money project), a double sided, three-colour screen print.
For most of December I worked on the design, created my home screen exposure setup, bought equipment, mixed inks and then made a few colour test runs.
Whilst I’ve been unable to work on my printmaking, I’ve decided to look at the positives: there are still creative, useful things I can do whilst sitting down. I’ve been doing a few different things:
learning how to use GIMP properly
creating half-tone images for a group portrait
redesigning and producing cover images for my blogs
taking stock photos in the studio
watching all of the screenprinting videos on YouTube
brainstorming business ideas I won’t have time for
general plotting
Granted, coming up with new business ideas (screen printing can send you on tangents) is not exactly useful but it helps to keep your brain humming. I’ve got quite a few t-shirt ideas now!
Most of my screen print artwork (well, probably all of it) comes from hand-drawn elements, not computer graphics, but the fact is that some things would be better done using computer programs.
Over the last few days I’ve been able to get my head around GIMP at last – just enough to make it less intimidating and more of a help than a potential hindrance.
Next week?
Hopefully week 2 will see me more mobile but I think it’ll be more of the same: looking on the bright side and getting all the preparation in.
SEO has developed monumentally over the past few years. It is no longer considered to be merely a beneficial practice but more of a necessity for businesses who want to excel in the modern day, and there are lots of different SEO strategies available.
A good SEO plan is one that incorporates an array of different methods. The method you choose depends on the goals you aim to achieve. If you want to attain an international web presence and grow your blog business on a worldwide scale then you need to use global SEO strategies.
Read on to discover SEO methods catered towards creating an international web presence.
Extensive research
Before you begin to implement your SEO methods you need to partake in a huge amount of research. You cannot achieve your worldwide goals without doing the groundwork. After all, every country is different.
The products that appeal the most in the UK won’t necessarily be the most popular products in Australia, for example. You need to unearth the different consumer trends for each country. You need to predict what countries are most likely to provide you with the highest level of traffic and sales. And don’t forget to do research regarding the search engines in different countries. When you think about a search engine your mind instantly casts to Google, however, in other, countries they may be more popular search engines. You need to consider this and divulge as much information as possible about the relevant search engines.
Language
You are probably thinking: “Language? That’s what online translation services are for!” That may be true if you want to find out what a certain phrase means, but when it comes to SEO you need to divert a lot of your attention to language. If you want to embark your brand on an international stage then you will obviously need to advertise yourself and use SEO through using different languages. You need to speak the language of the locals on your blog.
For example, ‘chips’ and ‘fries’ – they both mean the same thing to someone living in the UK. However, in one country they may only use the term ‘fries’ and therefore if you translate ‘chips’ you are not going to get the true local word. This is relevant to a monumental number of words, such as; ‘vacation’ or ‘holiday’, ‘living room’ or ‘lounge’, and ‘couch’ or ‘sofa’. It is imperative you use the words of the locals because these are the words they are going to be using when they search on a search engine. And, if your words are incorrect then no one will see your webpage.
Let people have a choice
And finally, when people enter your website they should be presented with a drop-down menu whereby they can select the language they wish to view the website in. You should never merely assume.
There are lots of blogs where they use technology in order to decipher where the person viewing the website is situated. They then use that knowledge and present the website in the relevant language. For instance, they detect someone is in France and, therefore, the language is automatically French. But there are lots of people who live in different countries and do not use the language of the locals. What happens if the person viewing is an Italian person simply living in France for a year?
You can also use these tools to adjust your adverts accordingly. InboxDollars is a great example of this – advertising this to people in the US is great, but InboxPounds is better for those in the UK.
If you research extensively, use the proper language, and think about the customers’ wants then you can use SEO effectively to reach a global presence.
Although I haven’t posted any news in a long time, it’s not for lack of news to share; in fact, I’ve been busier than ever in the studio. This project has been fascinating me and making me want to share, but at the same time making me want to hide away until it’s all done and perfect.
Unfortunately, perfection is still quite far off and I’m trying hard to embrace that. So here’s the story of casting a giant pewter coin when you’ve never done any pewter casting before.
Moving from aluminium to pewter
My initial idea was to make an aluminium coin using the lost foam process, as we’d been casting aluminium with our newly made bucket furnace. The problem was getting the foam coin ready in time for when we decided to fire up the foundry… firing it up was time-consuming and required more than one person as well as decent weather, which was definitely a problem.
In short, I got a suggestion from a friend to try pewter instead, and that freed me up to do lots more experiments and work in my kitchen instead of outside.
Making the wax positives
Foam was nowhere near good enough for the level of detail I wanted, and anyway, I was moving to a lower-melt metal, so I started to work with wax to make the initial prototypes that I would then make casts from.
Beeswax was so foreign and fiddly that I just couldn’t stand it. I started experimenting with adding hot melt glue sticks to the mixture, which gave me a more plastic, flexible material. The problem with this was that it was harder to join pieces together.
It feels like a serious injustice to condense it so much here, because I feel as though I spent so much of my life over the last few months fiddling with wax, trying to sculpt the perfect coin.
Silicone casting
One thing I knew I had to do before going all-in with lost wax casting was to get some silicone to make a master mould of my coin. My first problem was that I knew next to nothing about silicone casting.
Cheapo, diy silicone casting – yes, I knew about that – but as I proved in some kitchen experiments, silicone sealant moulds don’t hold up against pewter. On top of that, I broke my first wax coin by pressing the silicone sealant mould onto it.
I had to get a reliable silicone that could be poured, not pressed. After a bit of research I bought a 1.1kg kit of M4512 RTV shore A 20 condensation cure silicone. And… I had no idea what any of that actually meant.
That silicone was fine for creating the wax versions of my coin, but it was so soft (hence shore A20, the lower number on a hardness scale ending at 100) that it was tough to cast it without the wax deforming the mould. I had to build a case to hold it and stop it bulging in the middle.
The portrait on this was terrible! But the silicone was so soft that it could easily be pressed in, making the wax too thin.
Lost wax failures
My first attempts were with lost wax casting using plaster of paris as an investment material. This was ok to a certain extent, but I got loads of bubbling and pitting. Whilst it was definitely recognisable as a coin, it wasn’t exactly good enough.
This was why I didn’t want to start the process without having a way to replicate my wax coin. I had to start over with more sprues in my plaster and more ways for my pewter to vent steam without pitting, but it had taken so much time to cast the investment blocks and dry them that I decided I needed to get some high-temperature silicone that I could just cast the metal directly into.
One advantage of not getting a perfect result at this point was that it made me stop and go back to the drawing board and redesign the coin and the way I made the positive. Instead of just using wax, I made my positive up from foamboard for the base and rim and wax for sculpted elements.
This stage – redesigning – did take more time than I wanted it to, but the result was a much better looking coin than I’d started with. If I hadn’t failed at first then I’d have come out with an uglier version, so some comfort there.
High temperature silicone casting
Figuring that I knew a fair bit more about condensation cure silicones and all that, I was a bit more confident about making my second purchase. Unfortunately I couldn’t find MoldMax 60 in the UK and nothing else that I liked at a decent price, but I did find an alternative on eBay – a 1kg kit that mixed at a 50:50 ratio and cost only £26.
1kg sounds like a lot, but… well… it’s not. Fortunately this stuff does the job and copes well with the high temperatures, so I was happy with that.
Although I was on the home straight I still had problems. I was pouring the pewter directly down into my mould, and I was constantly finding surface pitting and burn marks where the pewter had poured in.
Enlarging the pour spout helped with getting rid of bubbles at the very top, and lots of new, large vents along the sides did help somewhat, but nothing got me the perfect copy of my wax coin. I still had a sculpture that needed lots of grinding, sanding and scraping.
Finishing the sculpture
At this point, a couple of months in, I decided to get some more high temperature silicone and redesign the gate system to minimise burning and pitting when I poured the metal. Before that, though, I wanted to finish the coin as much as I could, and yet again rework the initial wax sculpture to refine elements that still didn’t work.
So here’s the prototype, which features a few elements that weren’t included in the original design, but will be integrated into the final run.
Casting a giant pewter coin was definitely more of a challenge than a smaller coin, but because of this project, smaller coins are currently in production as well.
The exhibition was brought together by Lara Luna Bartley in collaboration with the CoResist Collective, and features artwork about the financial and banking system.
Lara was kind enough to share some pictures of the exhibition space. Other artists featured are Jane Lawson, Darren Cullen & Mary Millner.
Lara Luna Bartley was the teller at the ‘Bank of CoResist’, printing banknotes which audiences could ‘borrow’ at 0% on a very long term basis, provided they would become a member of the bank for a small fee.
Darren Cullen’s Pocket Money Loan Posters are spot on… prompting that uneasy double-take. The state of dysfunction that we’re in when it comes to our use and abuse of credit means that we’re never quite sure what next, new low is possible.
The exhibition marks 10 years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and featured a discussion with economist Tony Greenham entitled “Money, Trust and the Art of Local Banking”.
I’ve decided to make my own money. I’m asking you to trust in me. For money to exist, there must first be trust. Money requires relationships, because since money is a measure of exchange, there must be someone else to exchange with. When we hand over money in exchange for something else, we don’t necessarily have to trust the person we’re buying from; instead, the trust lies in the institution behind the money. The more of us who put faith in the institution, the more value the money has. What if we were to ask others to put their trust directly in us instead? As human beings, our trustworthiness only runs so far… but maybe being honest about that makes us more reliable than banks and governments, that present themselves as being strong and permanent, but still regularly let us down. My currency art isn’t offered for sale as much as for exchange, if you trust me.
