Life Archives - Page 5 of 8

Studio Notes 07/06/19

What goes up must come down… it’s always hard to say goodbye after a visit, and I’m well and truly fed up with more than 20 years of living an ocean apart from half of my family.

But hey, that’s the life of the immigrant/expat, and you just get on with it.

Back to that mould-making failure

As I was writing this, I heard an amazingly salient phrase in a podcast – “never waste a failure”.

It was directed towards entrepreneurs and I immediately thought about the ways that I’ve learned from failure before, but I’m staring despondently at this mould that I thought would be the one, and wondering how to get my head back in the game and start all over.

So now I’m seriously having to think about everything I was considering about my working methods before: why I naturally gravitate to doing everything by hand and how I can get over that.

It’s a tug-of-war between the conceptual and the physical artwork that I go through all of the time, and to be honest it’s still wigging me out right now… but I’m just going to get over it and invest in some equipment.

Designing and publishing

Since the mouldmaking and comedown from family time I’ve had to jump into something completely different – creating journals – to fulfil two objectives:

Cheer myself up by tackling a project on my long-list
Create more recurring revenue

This project can cross over between my art business and my separate web publishing business, but I’m focusing on creating products for my other business first, since it’s the bigger one, and as it’s less reliant on imagery I should be able to create several different books that will form a single series.

Distractions are usually something I beat myself up over, but this time around I definitely need it!

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Studio Notes 31/05/19

The last week has been fantastic – we’ve had a great time as a family and worn ourselves out traipsing around Lancashire. I made sure to get a few reference photos of Mum for a future portrait and as usual, she gave me instructions to magically erase a few decades.

A dismal failure with Composimold

I cut open the mold I made last week and found that although the disaster with the wax that I had anticipated hadn’t actually happened, another disaster took its place.

The paper and card form stuck to the Composimold and disintegrated. Maybe it was because it stayed in there for a few days… maybe if I’d have cut it out straight away it would have been alright.

So with my positive destroyed, I really needed the cast that came out of it to be a hit. Unfortunately, the wax melted the Composimold in parts, split the sides and lost lots of the detail. All of the modeling work from the last few weeks was wasted.

Right… next week I’m back to the grindstone I guess. This week I’m too busy to be upset about any of it.

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Studio Notes 24/05/19

It’s only a quick line today to say… she’s here!

My mum arrived after a 24-hr long journey from the US, and we have a heck of a lot of catching up to do. It’s always good to reboot to factory settings and talk Bajan! So much of one’s identity and culture is bound up in language that not being able to speak your dialect can have a pretty big effect on you, whether you realise it or not.

Projects on the go in the background

My Composimold arrived earlier this week and I started my first mould attempt – I still haven’t had the time to cut it open though, as prepping the house for our royal visitor came first.

We’re going to take some photographs on which to base some portraits, and my plan is to execute them in screen prints or Solarfast, depending on how things go.

Besides that, there are no more plans than to enjoy time with my family this week.

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Studio Notes 17/05/19

This week has thrown some surprises up into the air – good surprises, but big ones. If you want a hint, you can start with this post I wrote in 2017 about an investigation that was decades in the making… well, it looks as though it’s come to an end.

Sculpting and battling impatience

In the last week I’ve jumped into sculpting a new, final version of my 250 coin, taking what I’d learned from making the prototype and getting it perfect this time.

Only… we know there’s no such thing as perfect, right?

Technically, yes, but I like to dance around that area of madness anyway. What makes it maddening is that I’m drawn to making painstaking, fiddly work, but I am ridiculously impatient as well!

What I’ve changed is starting to work primarily with layered paper to create low-relief forms and then add details in wax, which are then carved into.

Using paper and wax to create low-relief sculpture.

Redesigning on a computer only gets me so far, but I still have to do the majority of the tweaks by hand with a physical model.

I had hoped to make a cast using Composimold and then refining that, but the batch I ordered doesn’t look likely to arrive until next month! I really don’t want to have to wait that long, so I might use my DIY silicone trick instead. Hopefully impatience won’t be my downfall this time…

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Studio Notes 10/05/19

What a busy week – redesigning the pewter coin has been the most important thing, but I’ve squeezed in a few jobs on the side as well, like re-stretching an aluminium screen and prepping materials for a new miniature sculpture.

Last week I had planned to restretch a couple of screens using two-part evil glue, but when I finally got an afternoon of dry weather and opened up the bottles, I realised that the hardener had – well – hardened, and it was unusable.

My ghetto screen stretching method

All of this after I’d started the process: I tacked the mesh across a wooden frame that was just bigger than the aluminium frame, laid it on top of the aluminium frame and clamped it tightly down onto it. That would stretch the mesh even tighter over the new frame and allow me to glue the mesh and screen surfaces.

Stretching an aluminium screen with a wooden screen

That way I’d get a very taut, professional-quality stretch in my back garden. Well, that was the plan until the glue problem, so having set everything up – clamps and all – I just went ahead with contact cement.

So far so good – I sliced the screen out of the wooden frame and it’s kept its tension, but I’m going to have to test its resistance to all the screen printing processes. And… I’m out of mesh for this size of screen, so I’ll have to buy some more before I can carry on.

Back to sculpting the coin

When I started the process of sculpting coins last year I came up against the problem of creating precise marks in materials that don’t lend themselves to the level of precision that I wanted.

Everything I did was made the old-fashioned way: all hand carved, with the most advanced process being photocopying. This is kinda how I roll; my natural inclination is to do everything without computers, not because I have to prove something, but because that’s just how I learned to do things and that’s what comes naturally. If I’m going to push this to where it needs to go, that has to change.

The point isn’t to create industrially manufactured pieces, but to marry the idea of a hand-made object of value with that of a mass-produced symbol of value. Basically I need to upgrade my processes.

With modern coin design and manufacture, you can’t get away from computers and machines. I’ve been thinking about ways to incorporate more computer-assisted working into my practice, whether it’s getting a 3d printer or – as an alternative – a plotter cutter.

I’ve spent the last week researching these and it’s made my head spin. The thing is, they’re pitched firmly at the crafts market, and it can be hard to figure out if the machine you’ve spotted will be suitable for more robust work, or, more importantly, original work (not being restricted by locked-in software).

My plan is to use one of these to precision-cut paper layers to laminate sculptural forms. It’s not that out of the question – it’s basically how I’ve been forming my new coin this week, but by hand. Maybe before too long I’ll have a bit of help with that.

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