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:
"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!!
Oil-based paints really are the worst! I also find it stressful to not be able to wash them out of things (brushes, clothes, tables, hands…) with water.
From research I did when I was considering repainting my radiators, metal nearly always need to be primed before painting- oil and latex paints will never really stick to it otherwise. I don’t know if a non-porous backing affects the drying rate, but that might be why it keeps wrinkling. So you might just want to prime the box rather than giving up on your oil paint. I have some primer at home, – if you like I can check if it would work on metal, though I suspect it won’t- I bought it for wood and I think they make specific primers for metal. (I never did get to the radiators, not because of the painting itself, but because I realized the insane amounts of labor involved in cleaning the 1/4 of existing paint and rust off first.)
(This is repeated from lj, since I forgot you really don’t like reading comments there.)
I try to wear clothes that are already painted, and gloves, to keep the paint off things I care about.
When I was buying the paint, I made a point of asking, “Can it go directly on existing paint?” and was told yes, but I should sand it a bit first. Nothing about primer, or sanding down to bare metal. So I did that. I think I might have just put too much on for the first coat.