Category Archives: 2d

Together Festival; new art; oil paint is Bad News; probably some other things, too

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NEWSY THINGS

I will be vending at the Together Festival on April 7 from 11-5. The festival itself runs from April 2-8. If you came to the Burner Bazaar in December and liked what you saw, you should come check this out, too!

And I submitted an application for this year’s CSArt program, run by the Cambridge Center for Adult Education. I won’t know for a while whether I’ve even made it through the first round of selections. It’s a really fantastic program, and I hope I get in. If I don’t, well, the proposal I submitted is something I’d like to try out anyway; it’s nice to have another art concept lurking around for days when I get bored with the same old business.

ARTY THINGS

Speaking of lurking concepts, I’ve had this one skulking about in my head for months and months, and I finally took the time to track down some reference images I could use to create the silhouette and cracked pattern:

silhouette of a raven in flight on a shattered heart

"Raven heart" needs a better title.

References used: Raven 13, by EquineStockImages, and Broken by devradiopooh (that link no longer works but it did as of 5 days ago). I have a couple other variations over on deviantART.

One of the ways I pay attention in meetings is to doodle in my sketchbook. It’s a good way to come up with new ideas and work out a million zillion variations before trying them in wire. Here’s one of them in wire now:

Variation on the tooth theme. These are rather large, but very light.

GRIPEY THINGS

OH MY GOD OIL PAINT!!!

So on the advice of several people who sell paint for a living, I bought some Serious Oil-based Paint for painting the Dig Box. And I put on a first coat, and I waited for it to dry so I could apply a second coat, because the first coat wasn’t completely covering the original paint. The cans of paint say “Dries to the touch in 3-4 hours. To apply a second coat, allow to dry overnight.”

And the next morning I checked on it, and it was NOT EVEN DRY TO THE TOUCH!!! In fact, where I touched it, the paint wrinkled up.

That was Friday morning.

Today, Monday, I came in to sand the damn thing and put on coat #2.

GUESS WHAT.

The surface is now dry to the touch, but it’ll still wrinkle up, which means NO SANDING, unless you want to immediately gunk up the sandpaper beyond salvation.

So I spent almost two hours scraping paint off the damn box, so that it might someday dry enough that I can sand ALL THE OIL PAINT OFF and go for spray paint. Or maybe latex, because that was also an option for super-duper, resistant-to-weather paint, and I should have gone with that from the start.

So. Oil paint. I have almost 2 quarts I will not be finishing off. One in a lovely dark green, the other in the wrong shade of pale blue.

Anyone want it? The paint store claims it’s awesome!!

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Cake & Robots and Anti-Surveillance Eagles

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I’ve been spending a lot of time over the past few months on some 2D projects. If pixels are even 2D, that is. Does information have dimensions? Whatever. They can be printed out, that’s close enough.

So.

I’ve got a shop set up via Printfection, at Feather Forge Prints (and also Zazzle and Cafe Press), where you can see and buy t-shirts and mugs with the following art:

First, Cake and Robots:

Do I need to explain this?

I’m not sure I can.

There’s not much to say, really. There are robots! And cake! (There are individual robots, too.)

Second, filed under Anti-Gorgon Alliance, the Anti-Surveillance Eagle:

This was inspired by an unused security camera on the exterior of a building. Discussion ensued about what should be done with the camera, since it was not going to be used as a real camera any more.

I had the idea that a metal sculpture of a bald eagle, symbol of the United States, posed as if attacking the camera, might make a neat statement.

But I hate climbing tall ladders, metal sculpture might hurt my delicate hands, and I’m impatient. So I fired up my favorite graphics programs, and made this. (I made several variations, in fact, because it seems they are like potato chips.)

I am going to donate 50% of what I get from sales of the eagle design to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, because they do A LOT of good work to ensure we still have civil rights, even more important in times when the government keeps renewing crap like the Patriot Act, ACTA, Protect-IP, and other legislation that increases the ways in which law enforcement can spy on you without good cause. The EFF has lots of useful information for protecting your personal information online.

Privacy is an American value, it is vital for a functioning democracy, and I think it’s important to make that clear.

In addition, you can download the art for the anti-surveillance eagle. It’s a zip file with a whole bunch of different file formats.

Make your own stickers! Or posters.

Share and enjoy!

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