Monthly Archives: July 2011

Making Lemonade from Lemons

At Caitlin’s suggestion, last time I was at the sculpture supply place, I picked up a clay extrusion syringe that lets me squeeze out “hair” and various other shaped noodles. I made a couple of silly characters (which also have open heads using geodes that were also salted with glow in the dark powder) with clay hair. As I often do, I temporary attached them to a piece of scrap wood with glue as I often do. I made the little one first and everything went well, but when I did the bigger one, I guess I attached it a little too well, and I couldn’t get it off the piece of scrap wood, a short section of 2×4. Thus the lemons. So I decided to drill as many 3/8″ holes through the wood, re-attached the first head, and painted the wood red. It’s now lemonade, or, more accurately, a handy storage container for the multitude of micro-files that I use for carving.

Fixing stuff that glows in the dark

Normally if I screw up casting something and I have a bubble, I can just fill the hole with a little bit of epoxy clay — it’s not like anyone will know the difference once it’s painted over. However, with the glow in the dark stuff that’s just not an option, so I have to choose to either (a) deal with it and accept that it’s not perfect, (b) throw it away, or (c) use the hole as inspiration to customize it with a little carving. So that’s what I did here. The amulet started just like the masked girl below left (but with a bubble that wrecked the nose), so I carved it into the masked skull on the upper right — I actually think it’s probably an improvement.

These pictures were taken in a room with the lights on by the way — the glow is incredibly strong and is completely visible in normal lit interior spaces after they’ve been exposed to bright light. The reason that the indents (ie. the gaps between the teeth, the eye sockets, etc.) are darker than the raised areas is that the glow pigment particles sunk through the clear plastic as it was curing to collect in greater density along the surface of the face, which was on the bottom because the mold is a simple one-part open-faced mold.

I know I’ve mentioned them before, but I made a big series of these and have loads (almost) ready as either broaches or amulets. After spending every day for the last couple weeks at the park (or the pool), today I finally took a rest day (it being the seventh day and all). That’s not entirely true. We did try to go to the park and to the lake, but literally every parking space was taken so the trip was quite short. We did have a short stop at the High Park zoo, but all the animals were lethargic and hiding in the shade on account of the miserably hot suumers that Toronto has. Tomorrow we’re going to go to the shoe museum, which at first I thought would have zero lines, but then I realized that the gay influx from Pride week might disprove my theory. You may be surprised and/or disturbed to hear it’s not my first visit.