Post 41: Printing and Cutting Out the Elements of the Photo Collage

    It actually took me a good couple of days to measure and size the different elements of the collage. A few are single images, but most include several overlapping images, and have to be lined up and sized precisely.
     All the parts for the first two panels actually fit on a single 13"x19" sheet of matte paper. I like to add a few extra things to fill blank spaces, like extra insects, marbles, buttons, etc...

      It is a tight fit, and looks like a big jumble of things...

     Then comes the rather tedious, but somewhat zen like job of precisely cutting out all the pieces of the puzzle. The legs of insect are so small that I usually reenforce them with some white glue to keep them from braking, or reattach them if they already broke off. Same with the cords. I use a magnifier lamp for the smallest details.

    Then the white edges of the paper have to be colored with pastels so they blend in.

Post 40: On your marks, GO!

   I will be working on all three panels at the same time so the textures and tones match. It also should go faster.
   I created the light yellowish texture but rubbing in pigments, spitting, rubbing on multi colored light pastel sticks, spitting again, sprinkling watercolors with toothbrushes, sitting again and dabbing, rubbing darker shades of pastels some more lightly, sprinkling a weak Gum Arabic Solution, and finally spraying a finer mist of gum Arabic to fix the colors.

   Instead of using chalk to transfer the white patterns on the black areas and charcoal to transfer black patterns on light areas, I bought some white transfer paper and some graphite black transfer paper. The results are quite nice, and I am wondering whether to leave the lines as they are, or to redraw them with white and black pencils as my original intention was. I will do all three panels and decide later.

Post 39: Ready to Get Going!

       I started to build the three 18"x 18" panels for the first Tryptich with objects in niches:

      The Red Croquet Ball is actually much larger than the Top and the Pool Ball, so I decided to replace with a Red Pool Ball with an ivory dot, so the sizes of the niches would match at 2.75"x2.75"

    I built the niches in the 3 panels, gessoed them, and painted the "blackboard areas" with blackboard paint:

      Looking at the Photoshop mockup, I saw some possible improvements, added red lines to the side panels, moved things a bit, found a name for the brass plates, and for the tags. I also saturated the colors a bit and increased contrast. Here is the current Mockup of the "Red Top Tryptich":

Heavy Heart, Danger...                              Work for the Red, Top...                                 All Red, No Juice...     

         

Post 38: Back from Guatemala with Great Textures

   We spent the Holidays in Antigua, Guatemala with friends. It had been 10 years since our last trip, and it was great to be there again. We have been there quite a few times over the years and driven all over this fascinating country, with one of the richest textile tradition in the world. There is no denying  I have been influenced by this place, the colors, the walls, the old doors, the Santos.
   I took a camera with me strictly to collect textures of old walls to use as inspiration for backgrounds, and brought back hundreds of fabulous ones. Just as an example:

    I also photographed graves, windows, architectural details, doors and hardware:

tly to c

Post 37: A Series of Small 12"x12" Simple Panels as Entry Level

   As I said previously, I want people to buy the stuff when I have a show, and have something at every price point, starting around $250.
   My original 12"x12" so called "Test Panels" were not made to sell, but I could do a Series along the same lines that could be hung in square groups of 9. The Test Panels do not really match in style, as they were experiemental, but still look pretty good as a group because the colors are consistant and warm thoughout:

     I suppose after all that thinking and planning, it's time to cut, glue, sand and prime some wood...
     Also, I still have a whole bunch of stuff to photograph, and also need to keep looking for objects I like, but are not so rare and attractive that I can't give them up and use them in a panel...

     I always liked old bottles. My mother in law had a huge collection of old bottles she dug up from abandoned dumps and displayed all over her house. I borrowed some for a while to do a bottle painting as part of my "Collections Series" back in the late 80's, and it turned out beautiful and sold quickly. But that was a lot of work to paint all the details, transparencies and reflections. It was huge too, about 5ftx7ft, on 4 large sheets of paper. Here is "Massie's Diggings", apiece I am still very proud of:

   I actually still have some of these bottles, but I don't want o use them in this project, so I ordered some apothicary bottles with glass stopper on Amazon, and will watch on eBay for good deals on old ones. Most seem to sell in the $20-30 range, but I have already found a 5.5" one for less than $10 including shipping:

     I would like to make for it my own aged ragged pharmacy label,  fill it with some kind of strange "snake oil", and use it as the starting point for a triptych, may be recessed in an ornate nook with a mica window. Time will tell, the possibilities are infinite...
     Cornell did a couple of intersting pieces with small bottle, which will no doubt inspire something quite different in the end. I like this one very much, which is actually rather unlike the rest of his shadowbox work:

Post 36: An entirely Different Concept and a Spare Design

     Among all the images of Astronomical and Astrological Charts I have collected, one was huge, very complex, and very interesting, the Wright Celestial Map from 1741.  It shows on the same page the different conceptions of the Solar System developed over two thousand years by the Egyptians, the Chaldeans, Ptolemeus, Platon, Pythagore, Ricciolus, Tycho Breha, etc...
    I have always liked old maps and charts, but I was particularly taken by this particular one because I just finished reading 3 big volumes about the lives and work of Copernicus, Kepler, and Gallileo, who themseves came up with diffeent systems.

    It is big and detailed enough to be spread continuously over the 3 pieces in a triptych, so I built three virtual 18"x18" panels of chalkboard, with veneer frames, layered the chart with the Luminosity Effect so it is visible, but subtle enough to remain in the background. It will eventually be drawn by hand in chalk on a base of chalkboard paint. I can only used a narrow slice of the central part of the Cart, with the Sun slightly off center on purpose.

     This can become an unusual piece looking again very different from the others, yet still be an Hommage to Cornell, who loved Astronomy. I will have to keep it simple. The chart shows the orbits of the Earth, Jupiter, Venus, Mars, and(barely) Saturn. I had on file a number of Nasa images of the Planets I could draw from, so I placed the planets on their orbit where marked, added the names of Copernicus, Kepler and Gallileo and symbols for the Zodiac signs to the background,  and decided I would cut out small 4 to 5"doors opening on niches where I would place balls painted to look like Jupiter and Mars, as well as the Sun:

        The small Mars and Jupiter will also be painted balls serving as knobs to open the doors. The Sun door will open with a real key hanging from a nail in the frame. 

      I am even thinking of possibly painting the planets and the sun on 4" light bulbs that would turn on when the door is open.

Post 35: Something Different

   I often surf eBay or Etsy in seach of interesting old things that do not cost much, and hapenned to run across a set of three weaving Bobbins with nice colors of wool on, wound to create a nice bulge, and I bought them, thinking I could build a Triptych around them. Those are definitely my colors:

    They are definitely very oblong in shape, and 9" long, so I decided to build 3 vertical panels 18"Wx 25"H, with narrow vertical niches to fit the Bobbins. I also thought the "Veneer Frame" I used on the big Blackboard would match the color of the spools nicely, and they would stand out on matching dark rusty brown background with the same Cosmological chart drawn in a lighter shade:

    This time, I decided to work on the 3 panels at the same time as a triptych, and made a template that could possibly be re used with different oblong objects(bottles, pods, tools, etc...), using other backgrounds and textures:

      These Bobbins are designed to fit in a Wooden Boat Shuttle, so I looked on ebay, and found some nice cheap ones. I made a low offer and got them even cheaper. They are on the way, but the plan is the photograph them with the Bobbins in place, and to use these images. 

     I brought back from my World Travels several spindles used to make the wool thread by hand, so I searched for images of better ones, and found an image of some wonderful decorated Inca Spindles from Peru:

   Unfortunately, the image is too small to print, so I will have to eventually make some, either for real or in Photoshop. I also found images of old wooden combs used to pack the wool weft on the loom, and images of interesting Ancient Spindlewhirls. I built the composition of all three pieces similarly with different images.

    I wanted some sort of narrow frame around the niche, and doing some research on weaving techniques, found interesting diagrams showing the Jacquard patterns for different designs. Most were too complicated, but I found a couple simple enough to give an interesting pattern:

 This is where I am now, and I am letting it sit before adding anything else which it probably doesn't need. Always careful not to overwork...