Work-in-Progress Sundays: Artificial Tears

This is the piece I was doing all those blue enamel samples for. It's very much in-progress, but I thought I'd toss up some shots of how it's going. I'm still working out some design aspects of it, which is why I haven't enameled any of it yet. (Planning and thinking before rushing ahead- I'm learning!)

I like the look of it thus far, but I'm debating adding little droplets with jump rings to the bottom of the wavy pieces. I put one on the far right to see how it looked (you can see it more in the picture below). One of the nice things about enamel is that I can cover any holes I drill, so I can do a fair amount of physically designing before I fire the piece.

I'm not thrilled with how it hangs on my face, and I'm considering attaching a chain to the nose chain that would go up and over my head, then attach to the two side chains in the back. I'm tempted to get all chain-design happy like I did with my last mask, but I also want to make sure this piece stands on its own apart from that one. I also need a new MANNEQUIN or other cunning display method, which is why I'm saving this one for next weeks critique as opposed to showing it this week. Time to whack the idea tree again.

Feedback, particularly on the hanging tear drops, gratefully appreciated.

Science by fire- orange enamels

One of the cool things about enameling is how you can manipulate the texture through firing time. Over-fired pieces get an "orange peel" texture (check it out!), which can be good or bad, depending on what you're going for. In this case, I was going for Science, so it's all good. I used orange enamel because I've been dying to see what it looked like, and I harbor a slightly paranoid distrust of the existing enamel samples in the studio.

This was one of my first solder experiments I did last term, so it's fitting that I effectively destroyed it to experiment with enamel now. I cleverly forgot about how the kiln melts solder like marshmallows in a microwave, but I managed to remember as soon as I peeked in and saw the piece collapsing. You don't really learn things until you fuck 'em up anyways.

In the spirit of "it's already fucked, let's fuck with it", I sprinkled on a little flux, and painted some heat resistant liquid on the solder joint, but no dice- it still melted like fondue. But now I know!

It's a good thing I did this one before I went on to destroy this piece, which was next on the enameling chopping block. I'm still eyeing it for potential, but I think it'll escape the kiln this time around.

Enamel samples- bloo

I did a series of blue enamel samples on scrap copper to test out colors for a piece idea I'm currently fooling around with (working title- artificial tears). I'm usually crap about testing things out well in advance to making a piece, so these little pieces of glass with the enamel number and color dutifully recorded in sharpie on the back are kind of a big deal for me.

Turquoise, 326

All of these are transparent, because I'm still experimenting to understand the properties of transparent enamel. My first piece using transparent enamel completely covered up the liver of sulfur etched text, and I am going to find out why. With SCIENCE.

Blue bluebell

I overfired this one deliberately, since it was starting to look clearer the longer I left it in the kiln. And I wound up with firescale in the middle (?!). MORE SCIENCE IS NECESSARY.

Cascade, 2510

This one was also overfired, resulting in the blackened edge. But it's also the prettiest out of all the samples.

Cadmium Blue, 321

This one was fired perfectly, so I had to crack the glass at one point so the others didn't get jealous. Also I wanted to see what happened.

SCIENCE!

East of the Sun, West of the Moon Enameled Bird Piece

Enameling metal is my new significant other.

A little bit about this fresh love of my life. Enameling is the FREAKISHLY COOL process of firing glass to metal. You can do seriously awesome things with it (you can also make godawful kitchy crap, but we're going to avoid that.) It appeals to me because you can add deep, rich, textured color to metal, it's a deceptively simple process with huge amounts of potential, and it takes about 1/5 of the time as anything else in the metal studio.

The really nice part of enameling for me is that it's a perfect side project. I can fire up the kiln, do a bunch of test pieces, and not waste too much time away from anything big I happen to be avoiding. And I wind up with all these bright, shiny, colorful pieces of metal on my desk to toy with!

This is the first serious piece I did using enamel. I had a pierced strip of copper that I was trying to make into a collar with a bird suspended over the throat left over from last term. The bird is suspended by a little jump ring, as you can see from the movement. Not firing enamel over the hole for the jump ring was hell and a half, and I wound up covering the bird's hole (snerk), so the jump ring is just bent into the divot that the enamel left.

This is the other side of the piece- it's got a slight curve to it so it stands up independently. This was the only decent shot I got of the white side, because the glass reflects light so glossily. I might try to take a few others to do it justice. Enameling metal requires using both sides of the piece so that it's equally weighted and doesn't crack the glass, which I was deliberately designing for.

The title refers to one of my favorite fairy tales, because of the whole White Bear, black night, transformation bit. God, I love that story. I wanted the piece to evoke a fanciful, storytale, shadowbox without being too blatant about it, and it think it's my favorite thing I've done so far this term.

(You really have to hold it and watch the little bird twist and turn from black to white to appreciate how much I'm in love with it.)

Prong-tacular!

This was a quick test piece I did while avoiding my real project the other day. We learned how to set stones with bezels and prongs last week, and it piqued my interest in using prongs in one of my masks.

I'd like to use mirrors in place of eyes in my next piece (apparently all my work this term is going to be inescapable creepy). The idea bouncing around my head is to create elaborate housings for the mirrors using prongs to mimic and stylize eyes.

This is the back. I just used a scrap piece of copper I had lying around, so it already had some interesting negative space going on before I sawed out the prongs. I shaped it a little with the bend so that it would stand up on its own on my desk.

Prongtacular.

New metalwork!

First of all- apologies. Non-consensual hiatuses, even in the nebulous world of internet-land, are uncool. I disappeared to the East Coast for a month over the holidays, and when I got back I had to throw myself full-fledged into a new term of metalworking. I just now managed to get my head above my work long enough to bring my camera into the studio and photo my first piece of the term.

It's untitled, or at least a good title hasn't come to me yet. I'm spending the next term doing a series of facial jewelry- delving into masks, but not necessarily using masks as my starting point, yanno? Theoretically, I'll end up with three pieces by the end of the term, although I'm hoping to have time to make more.

I spent the first three weeks of class shaping and forming the eye piece, and trying to create a matching mouth piece to hang with a chain on either side of the nose. I didn't bring in Simone here to model it until the day before critique, and when I slipped the piece on her, the mouthpiece looked a BDSM mouthgag gone horribly, creepily, WRONG. Wrong in a thousand ways that didn't crop up at all when I was working it on my face.

I scrapped the entire mouthpiece and started from scratch with some chain I had been idly putting together in my free time. I set up a little liver of sulfur bath at my desk so I could patina it as I went (we were at t-minus 3 hours before the studio shut down for the night). I learned more about chainmaille that night than I have in five months of metalworking.

I wanted to incorporate some fake fur that my partner-in-crime Claire had let me have, so I glued it around the eye piece to soften the look a little and create contrast. It originally exploded out from the mask and overwhelmed the metal, but I trimmed it down and let it be more fuzzy.

By this point in the night, I was comfortable with the mask and chain, and I let myself get into dressing the model. I took a bunch of metal scraps and jump rings and pierced her up (no flinching, she was lovely and stoic). The fur made a great collar and hairpiece, which I gave up on keeping on her head, and by the end of the night I was pretty fuckin' pleased with the end result.

The critique went really well, with one hitch- everyone wants to see another mannequin in my next piece. Which is fine and dandy, but the mannequin tree (read- dumpster) has been scarce this season. Anyone have a spare body lying around the donate to Art?

(Extra long post because I miiiiiissed you all! Mwah! Mwah! I kiss your face, internet.)

Who wants to buy me a drying rack for Christmas?

(If you're still hoping to be at all surprised by what you get for Christmas, I highly suggest putting your hands over your eyes right about now)

About the drying rack- I kid, I'm building one out of cardboard and chewing gum. No one run out and buy me anything like this. Or this.

Being in full giftmas production mode has made the garage a leetle ridiculous. I worked in glorious technicolor all day, and I got great shades on some of the prints. Some less so (see the yellow orange misregistered one), but I'm overall happy with the results.

I particularly like this one And there are fewer imperfections than usual on it!

I'm increasingly strapped for time, leaving tomorrow morning and all, so I'm probably just going to hunt down some bleach and a toothbrush when I get to the East Coast to clean these up. And bring my makeshift tear down bar (metal ruler) and some erasers for backup. And hope I can find a big enough table to work on at home. AND find something huge to weight them down, because I decided to transport everything rolled up in my magical art tube.

I do love seeing all my work spread across the floor, though, especially with all the colors. It's like a morbid rainbow!

Skül- now with more paper!

It's snowing like fuckery outside today, but I had the Job of Doom that I've been trying to finish for my client (the one that has thus far suffered from expired chemicals, broken hoses, and lately, overly thick emulsion application), so I put on everything warm I could find and went out to the meat freezer that is my studio in the winter. That screen YET AGAIN failed to work, but I decided not to let it get me down and pull a bunch of prints I'm planning to give to folks when I go home to the East Coast fer Christmas. (I'm making a bunch of other ones, so don't go thinking that y'all know what you're getting early or anything).

My very advanced drying techniques, in the absence of a drying rack, consists of clothespins and a string of prayer flags. I'm finding that, working in my grimy studio without a sink or wash-out booth, that the 15 minutes we spent on cleaning up messy prints in class is increasingly more valuable than all the time we discussed using the humongous expensive exposure unit. And if anyone has any tips for cleaning up imperfections on paper, I'd loooove to hear them.

I started out with the screens I've already had some success with making into prints (das fishy, and Le Pixelation de Psyche), but I wanted to experiment with a third, so I got out my Skül screen and figured I'd print large before tearing the paper down to see how it looked. And because I was getting tired of black on white, I threw in some blue ink.

I fucking love how it came out- the blue adds a hell of a lot to it that I didn't expect, and I wound up with this great graphic rock poster look. I've been using color very tentatively up till now because I associate it with having to be used in layers, but I forgot how dynamic a simple rainbow pull can be.

Freshly pulled glossy wet ink! You can just see the blue tones in this one, I let the black generally overwhelm it to keep it simple.

Next hurdle- figuring out how the hell I'm going to get all these across the country without damaging them anymore.

Trio 'o Shirts

I pulled these three shirts while yelling along with Amanda Fucking Palmer in the garage today. It's a Christmas commission for an etsy client, who specified the metallic fade ink and the designs. The photography is a little quick 'n dirty, but she loved the shirts.

I love how the ink faded out because of the placement of the skull. I was going to get brave and test my new 16" squeegee on this, but I chickened out and used my old 6" one instead.

This is the top half of the modified mannequin Michael made (say that 3 times fast) who occasionally models shirts for me. I never caught her name while Michael was around, but I've been called her Simone in my head. Her bottom half is white plaster over gold paint- any suggestions? Michael? Name your creation?

Dream of Trees

Screenprinting has been driving me crazy lately. Strike that- the incredibly bleak weather in the Pacific Northwest has been driving me crazy lately. But 3 weeks of it being too cold or wet to work in my garage studio hasn't been helping.

Paid commissions don't care what my levels of mental capacity are from day to day, of course. I've got two big jobs ("big" here is on a level corresponding to my one-person studio operations- three big jobs will pay my rent for a month) that I wanted to get done during my week off. I prepped, burned, and cursed out two screens for washing out COMPLETELY before I realized that all my fucking emulsion was expired.

There's nowhere to buy emulsion where I am, of course. I can drive an hour to Seattle and get shitty Speedball crap-in-a-can, or I can buy a new gallon online and wait two weeks- neither of which is an option for two jobs that need to be done by Friday.

The third option (according to the internet) is to overexpose my screens. I still have unpleasant memories of overexposing my first screens, but the internet apparently thinks that this is a wonderful idea. I have two freshly emulsed screens in my drying rack right now waiting to try this tomorrow, and if it doesn't work we're going to have to get REALLY creative.

Other things I've been waiting for with increasing frustration: American Apparel to stop making me jump through hoops to wholesale their clothes. I want to buy their stuff, I want to buy it cheaply, I want to put my shit on it and sell it. You'd think they'd want this too, but I'm in the middle of filling out my third resellers sales ID tax form for them this week.

Up top is a piece I forced myself to translated onto acetate because I haven't liked anything I've been able to make come out of my pencil in weeks. Below is the version I'm going to try to burn.

Someday I'll draw something that I actually want to see on a shirt. Someday.

Warning- Gross-ass photographic proof of my life in the metal studio

OH GOD IT'S AN EARTHWORM UNDERGOING HORRIFYINGLY BOTCHED COSMETIC SURGERY AHH KILL IT KILL IT DEAD.

Apologies for the radio silence, but I've been working on a big class project that's had me in the studio non-stop without a lot of time for fun side projects. As a result, my fingers are pretty lacerated and burned up on a regular basis- but being me, I'm mostly just morbidly fascinated and not really bothered or inconvenienced by it. I decided to document it a little- feel free to skip along to a less physically gross part of the internet any time now.

I'm used to burns from years of fire performance, but hot metal burns are a new experience. I'm treating the two little ones I've got with plenty of aloe and the usual stuff I rub on my fire burns- I'm interested to see how long they last and if they leave any sort of impression.

My thumb is particularly gross because it's in the direct line of fire from my jewelers saw when I cut jump rings. Also, metal dust has been collecting in my cuts, which then get liver of sulfur in them when I work with patinas. So I get these nice black lines all over the place.

I've always had a weird kind of fascination with my injuries, particularly when I get them from doing something I'm proud of (my black eye from a street show > my scraped knee from a botched head stand). Little injuries are like proof of something I did so hard it hurt- I'm fond of them the way I am of being sore from acrobatics every night. Anyone else ever feel like that?

New rings!

We've got this big assignment in class right now, which means I spend a lot of time getting frustrated and making rings in the studio. Rings are nice, tiny, easy things that let me practice soldering and play with patinas- they are an excellent distraction from trying to fit a godforsaken copper rose in a tiny bottle.

This one was the easiest, and actually is my favorite. Super simple wrap, although shaping it around the mandrel took some time to get perfect and I took some time to sand it smooth.

I like how it constrains my finger- it's like a little sheath.

Simple ring soldered shut, unfortunately too big for my thumb once I hammered it on the mandrel. Good practice though.

Aw, sweet, no? I wanted practice on hammering letters, so I put one of my favorite little stock phrases on it.

"Fuck love. Make art."

Heeee. I showed it to my friend Travis on the bus today, and he turned to me and said "You're very cynical, aren't you Mish?"

And here's the first ring I made out of my "frustration" series. Simple design, tried etching into it with little success (I wrote "serpentine" on it but it was too light for the patina to set in it).

Spirally!

Hee, I like using the macrofocus.

I'm going to keep playing with rings, they're like fun experiments that you can wear (and sell).