Sunday 24 February 2013

Update: Presenting my new Sculpting Project! + Painting & Glossing FAILURE...


Over the past few weeks, I've been working on a new project for my Etsy shop. Instead of making jewelry, I designed a bunch of different minimal looking sculptures in gold, black and white, like the ones in the image above. Those are the first two finished results so far. I can say I've gotten around to creating the shape. This is not a problem for me anymore. A few other things however turned out to have been a failure in this first batch.

The gloss I used, for instance, is some kind of semi-shiny polyurethane meant for wood. I guess that serves me right for asking advice on sculpting in a small shop that provides supplies for construction and home renovations. When I opened the can, the gloop inside was... some kind of peachy-salmony-orange. When I spread it on the sculpture, the color of the gloss didn't make a difference on the black and gold, but it did make the white allot less white, almost like bad teeth. Ouch.

...Not to mention that the white paint I used was old, with little crumblies in it, which made for a lumpy texture. It's not that I decided to use this bad paint despite it's condition, I kind of just found out along the way. I wouldn't have used it if I'd have known!! Too late, the lumpies have invaded. My paintbrushes are also getting old and crummy, too.  Yikes... I am in desperate need of new supplies! But all I have left is 10$.

I guess I'll go buy a good gloss at my local art store, and a pack of new paintbrushes to apply it without spreading dust around (goodbye old paint brushes). It's all I can really afford. The reason I'm so low on cash is I JUST DID my art groceries! (or rather, I thought they were done) : I got a can of white spray paint (ooh, fun!), an ENORMOUS roll of paper tape like I've never seen before, 3 different sized circle-sponge-brushes (round sponges on a stick) and when I realized that sponges make for awful poorly defined polka dots, a hole puncher.

The idea is to, for example, paint the entire sculpture gold, cut out my designs in the paper tape, stick it on the sculpture and spray paint my designs using the white spray paint. The hole puncher is for my polka dot patterns. I also got a skinny roll of tape for my striped sculptures. I'm hoping the spray paint will look more professional  (well, anyway, allot more professional than old lumpy white paint!) and save me allot of time.

It's okay!!! Everything's fine. This is taking forever, and I get it, new projects aren't always up and ready to run instantly, it's going to take me some trials and errors. We still don't have internet at the new home, but I'll try to keep coming to this coffee shop for the WiFi to post updates. It's a nice experience anyway, getting away from my new daily load of god awful house chores. (they're not that bad, I'm just lazy ;P) And as much as an x-small coffee with whipped cream might not be anything like a tall choco-mint iced cappuccino, it's still better than no coffee and no internet.