This isn’t a “realistic” painting that I’ve done. It’s a reproduction of a graphic that should be recognizable to many people, the Wonder Woman symbol. But the vernacular meaning of realism gets bandied about so much without any thought. It means that a painting looks like a photograph. Experimental photography proves that photography is not what is real. And neither is painting. Or was it at any time in its history. People see smaller-than-life images of paintings and think that’s what those paintings look like. But it’s not. I’ve seen a Richard Estes in person and it does not look like a photo. From a distance it does but if you get as close as the museum security will let you, you’ll see brush strokes and the texture of paint on canvas. You want paint that looks like a photo, go to the old masters. I hesitate to say that that kind of Masters licked surface technique is lost now, but I’m sure it’s rare.

Well, fuck. So my pretention is showing.

I’ll try to illustrate the painting process like one would explain how he built a backyard deck instead of how he redefined genres while referencing Dada, Neo-Dada and the films of Andy Warhol, in the process of building a deck.

Wonder Woman!

Acrylic paint is one of your more opaque mediums, meaning you can’t see through it so much. Watercolor is a transparent medium, I’ve used waters and was pretty good at it at one point, and oil paint is a semi-opaque medium, or so is my understanding; I’ve never used them. But whatever. The important thing is the pigment in the actual paint. Whatever medium it is. There are quality acrylics, oils and watercolors and they’ll behave better than some off-brand, Michaels craft shit. I can afford mediocre to to above average acrylics but I still sketched out my Wonder Woman logo like a draftsman. Partially because I’m anal-retentive in regards to precision and also so I’d know where not to put the red undercoat. The anal precision comes from the sculpture learnin’ but if I could afford a ton of high quality acrylics, Id’ve probably just smeared a bunch of red on the canvas then painted the yellow logo over top (intense colors like red will show through a yellow, with my affordable paints, the canvas and pencil draft marks showed through my yellow until a couple coats were added). I didn’t take a picture of my base sketch but here’s the roughed out red base coat:

The white area is a general Wonder Woman logo shape. The logo is yellow and a solid red background would probably show through the yellow paint I can afford.

That’s one coat of yellow. Still not perfect. But I’m going to put a black stroke around the edges of the yellow chest symbol. That and the stronger intensity of red paint over yellow will give me some leeway to straighten lines that go outside the lines. It’s OK to paint outside the lines.

Just adding a little variety to the initial flat yellow. Kind of a soft gold gradient but not really adding dimension. I’m not matching a specific color so I touch up the edges around the logo with a new red and applied the new red to the whole canvas for the sake of consistency. Again, since I’m not color matching, really any red would have done the job. And it’s probably not totally opaque the the initial shade will show through the new coat a bit.

Rough stroke that cleaned it up a little. Not perfect and I was not attempting to be perfect. I’m going to keep the feathered edges that extend beyond the colored interior of the symbol. Just a stylistic choice and one that matches the other paintings in this series. A bunch more paint is going over top of this layer anyway.

Halftone pattern. Or Ben-Day dots if feel the need to be a semantic asshole. The crux of this whole thing. At least to me. It’s the basis of printing color in magazines and comics so I’ve been thinking of ways to simulate it with paint. I wasn’t thinking about it too hard so it took a long time to get to this. It’s not perfect but I like it right now.

Halftone creates colors with four inks, color theory and illusion. I’m still playing around with the dots on canvas, adding contrasting colors on top of flats. Blue (or cyan) over red wouldn’t fly well as a 3″ by 3″ halftone printed comics panel. Unless I wanted a purple background

Put the solid stroke back on top.

Knocked back the dots. With a not-very-appealing red in an attempt to hide visible straight lines that came from my masking material. The masking material is machined so it has a bunch of perfectly space hole but also straight edges. Humans don’t do straight edges well so they bothered me on a painting that was done freehand with everything else.

Finished product more or less. It looks kind of drastic between this and the previous picture but it was just a push and pull of dry brush technique between a few coats. Trying not to cover up too many of my dots but keep the composition somewhat balanced. I added some blue too since it’s in her costume and the other two paintings.

So, anyone can paint. This was pretty simple and required little to no creativity. I’ve not really been taught to paint, which I’m sure is obvious to the world’s painters, but I’m not scared to try and to learn from mistakes and to work within my known strengths. Fear of being wrong is a detriment to any endeavor that is not life threatening. And there is no ‘wrong’ in art.

Here it is a little more final:

I just shellacked it and put that frame around it. It’s finished but also part of a larger work I’m slowly putting together.

Acrylic and spray paint on canvas, 2010.

I’m not much of a painter. It was more to teach myself how to mask the canvas to create the dots. They are not as prominent as I wanted but attempting actual CMYK printing techniques is beyond beyond the scope of my ambition.

“Yes. Yes, always with clay.”

I’ve been calling this a ‘shelf’ or an ‘entertainment center’ based on how pretentious I felt at the moment. I made it to hold my DVDs, video games and DVD/video game accessories. After I finished it, I filled it with movies in about ten minutes and still have a few left over. There’s also no room for games. At some point I may have to add more vertical real estate.

The flat pack, manufactured lumber entertainment center it’s replacing was a half foot or so deeper. This new one has made my bedroom look quite a bit bigger. The old pseudOkea thing was over a foot taller. The new one is less than two feet (≈ 18″-19″). I felt the urge to build some low furniture for some reason.

It was constructed with limited fasteners, three screws actually. The screws are only there because they helped level the top shelf; I was going to use dowels.

Made. Traced. Recreated. Semantics…

I found it in a calendar of old University of Georgia football artwork. Mostly game program covers. I don’t know why it has disappeared. It’s fucking awesome. And reminds me of this guy.

My recreation here needs some touch up but it’s OK for now.

Next step: touch up.

Following step: contacting whoever handles merchandising for the school.

The impetus was curiosity regarding the frequency of the word ‘car’ in Springsteen songs. I’ll probably play with it later but it took a while and I’m tired of it. Copy-pasting everything from Tracks kinda kicked my ass.

Update: Ok, I copy and pasted every lyric to (almost) every Bruce Springsteen song off of BruceSpringsteen.net, his official site. I wasn’t very scientific. I tried to include the chorus once then subsequent refrains were omitted. I didn’t know if songs like “I’m Goin’ Down” or “Land of Hopes and Dreams” would affect the cloud or if their frequent repetition of word (down and train respectively for my examples) or if such words in such song would be statistically insignificant. The latter seems to be the case based on the cloud and the rather large size of the rtf file I dumped all the lyrics into. If I wanted to be thoroughly obsessive, it crossed my mind to only use unique instances of words per song. There was also the problem of whether or not to manually alter the lyric so that, for example, angle, angels and angel’s and other frequent but not exact variations all count as one word. BruceSpringsteen.net is also not 100% consistent about spelling numbers versus using their symbols and also when choosing to transcribe a dropped ‘g’ at the end of a gerund, replacing it with an apostrophe, or spelling the word correctly. Editing a 60,000 word document for the purposes of statistical precision is not my idea of fun. Neither is copy-pasting for over an hour but whatever.

Since I had somewhere in the ninetieth percentile of The Boss’s published lyrics in a file, I turned it into a spread sheet. Available here for download as a zipped MS Excel format (Right-click and ‘Save as…’ if it’s being finnicky). I noticed some funkiness in the spreadsheet, 0hio instead of Ohio for example. I assume that and a few other anomalies are typos by the Official Site folks.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go sort my comics alphabetically by the chemical composition of their respective inks instead of by title then subdivide that based on what I was wearing when I read them.

I’m going to make an investment mold today.

Investment (Lost Wax Investment, specifically) is a very old, and calculatedly insane, way of creating a cast metal sculpture.

Make an object, ultimately out of wax, which is called a positive. Create a pour cup, something like a large target to pour the metal into, that will become the funnel through which you pour the metal. Connect this funnel to the object via tubular wax pathways, known as gates, for the metal to eventually flow through. Connect more, smaller pathways, called vents, to the object to allow any trapped gas to escape.

Then create a cylindrical shell of a mixture called investment around the wax positive. Mix up the investment in a liquid form and pour it into the round flask. Investment contains plaster which will harden a few minutes after it’s poured.

Insert into kiln, raise temperature over the course of a day to 1000 degrees and hold for one day. Wax melts out; on the third day, you’re ready to pour metal. You’ve created a white cylinder with a void in it in the shape of your positive, pour cup, gates and vents.

For a small, hand modeled casting like one of the ones I’m making, this whole process, minus kiln firing, could be done in, maybe, twenty hours.

The insane part is that any number of small mistakes can nullify all your hard work. The flask around your positive meant to hold the liquid investment can burst, spilling all over the floor and ruining your wax positive. If you’re careless and make your flask too small, too close to your positive, it’ll crack terminally in the kiln at the thin points and when you go to pour, molten metal can hemorrhage through the walls of your mold. If the kiln gets too hot, your mold will break down and crack all the way through.

The calculated part is to do it correctly; so that none of these events will occur.

Some cracking is unavoidable due to the expansion of the melting wax within the mold. Flashing is the term for the metal that seeps into these cracks. A casting will come out of the mold with what looks like a varying number of common sea fins fused to its surface. These get cut off later, along with the gates, vents and pour cup, all solid bronze, a process known as chasing.

Investment consists of plaster and other ingredients. Investment recipes vary, like how different chefs have different ways of perfecting the same recipe. We use plaster, sand and luto. Luto is made of pulverized molds that have already been fired. It isn’t reactive to the water that activates the plaster and has refractory properties.

Mold making is incredibly dirty. Old molds don’t pulverize themselves.

We keep the luto in big red trashcans. The cans line a small portion of the foundry wall. I reach into one, and try to find the biggest chunks I can (they smash easier). I throw them on the floor where I will turn them into powder with a makeshift tool, which consists of a small piece of 3/8” plate steel welded to a four foot pipe.

Luto is not 100% necessary. In the absence of readily available old molds, one can simply increase his or her sand and plaster to a 1:1 ratio.

Plaster. By the end of the investment pour you’re covered in it. In both its dried and powered form. Why would anyone go through all this trouble?

Because you can cast anything this way. I’ve heard stories of people casting insects (with ceramic shell method) and getting the antennae in metal.

It takes me a little over an hour to get my materials and run some errands. Around 3:30 I start to make my mold.

I go into my studio and get one of my gated and vented positives and move it into the foundry where I will pour the investment. It already has a flask around it. A flask is a fancy name for a chicken wire and tarpaper tube held together with duct tape.

This is a relatively small casting. I chose it because I think I can do it by myself. It probably won’t take more than one ten-gallon bucket of investment.

Bad Jimmy and I are doing a burnout, the name for the high temp wax removal process, by ourselves. We were actually supposed to do this Sunday but he was nowhere to be found and yesterday, he had to study for an art history test. I’m tired of waiting for him so I have decided to make this little mold by myself.

I begin by making a thick plaster seal around the bottom of my tarpaper tube. This will hold the tube in place and hopefully keep about thirty pounds of sand, luto, plaster and water from spilling all over my boots.

I measure and mix the plaster. It takes a few minutes for it thicken enough to be effective.

With my hands covered in the stuff a mosquito starts to check out my arm. Like most people, I hate mosquito bites but I’m covered in plaster so I have no way of swatting it without making a mess. It lands on my arm near the inside of my elbow.

Fuck it.

I smash it but leave the outline of the heel of my hand on the sleeve of my t-shirt in plaster. It’ll harden. The stain won’t be gone after a trip through the washing machine but at least there’s one less mosquito in the world.

The plaster in my pail is starting to get thick. As the plaster reacts with the water, I feel it start to warm up. Chemistry.

I add more and more of the rapidly thickening stuff to the base of my flask until the seal is a good three inches thick and the plaster is essentially solid in my hands. All told this step takes about a half hour.

When I’m done my hands and lower forearms are covered in dried plaster. There’s no good way to get it off. It has a tendency to rip the hair off your arms.

I busy myself with other details that I can focus on while my plaster dries. While I’m preparing buckets of investment without the reactive ingredient of plaster, Bad Jimmy walks into the foundry. Not the brightest guy. He still hasn’t figured out his nickname means ‘limp dick’ to the people who thought it up. He hears it and thinks ‘Michael-Jackson-Bad.’ We shoot the shit a little, I help him get his flask together.

He gets to the point that he doesn’t need help so I decide I can pour another mold since he’s here. Twice the warm bodies to dump slush. I get another positive and flask out of my studio and proceed to support the base with plaster like I did with the other one. We need more material ready so I put sand and water in the four other available large buckets.
I’ve been careful to measure all the ingredients. Pails of plaster, luto and sand. I go a tiny bit light on the water. My investments have been a bit wet in the past. I have no desire to lose a week’s work to sloppy mold making.

We pour my molds first. The luto and sand have been sitting in ten gallon buckets at the periphery. The reactive plaster is added last and mixed by corded drill with a three foot mixing bit held in its chuck. It’s a heavy mixture. Quick pulses, sharp pulls of the drill’s trigger at first to agitate it, prevent it from spitting four cups of pale, white water in your face. When the particulates begin to be held in suspension, it’s smoother. Still heavy, thick, but it can be mixed more rapidly without fear of the drill making you look like the end of some niche interest porno.

Like the plaster base that keeps your flask from spewing, time is still your enemy. The lack of it though. You’ve got to pour this shit fast. And it’s surprising the geometrical deception that occurs when looking at a flask and visually comparing its volume to three or four buckets of investment. Better to err on the side of caution. Or use the pocket ref to calculate the volume of all the players and be certain. But I only did that once because I was low on plaster.

Limp Dick cum WHO’S BAD! cups his hands over my positive while I dump the first bucket into the flask. I dump it into his cupped hands which deflect the flow away from my positive and against the wall of the flask. It prevents the liquid mold material from knocking a vent or gate loose. A dirty job but I’m going to do the same for him shortly.

He’s got enough ingredients laid out for eight buckets. His casting isn’t that large but its byzantine design requires a large mold. He doesn’t have enough material prepare. Not my problem.

We repeat the pouring process. Hands cupped like I’m going to boost someone over a wall, looking into his flask, I immediately notice the wall of his flask is dangerously close to part of his positive. Thin walls breach when subjected to the pressure of liquid metal.

I don’t mention it. I want to get out of here. I’ve been here 3-4 hours. I also wouldn’t mind seeing a bunch of molten bronze shoot out the side of his mold when we go to pour. For– spectacle’s sake. The molds are 75-90% buried in sand for the pour, and the pressure of the sand can keep a potential breached bronze mold together. But fireworks are nice sometimes.

After six buckets are poured into his flask, I stop helping him pour, shift focus on preparing the ingredients for the extra investment that will be required to make his mold. Half a mold won’t get fired, much less make fireworks. I get the ingredients together for three more buckets. He says that’s enough.

We have to work quickly against the solidifying plaster. If the investment we’ve already poured hardens and we pour more of the wet stuff on it, it will create a parting line that will weaken the final mold. A parting line is created when solid and liquid plaster meet. The pressure from the liquid bronze within the mold can cause the two parts to separate. This would be a disaster. For my mold. But I prepared enough constituent material.

Pounding luto,measuring sand, measuring luto and water, mixing, in triple time to outpace the chemical reaction and it’s unknowable speed.

During this final frantic part of the process, Juah walks in. She starts to prepare a two part resin bonded sand mold. Far enough away from us that a tsunami of liquid investment from a shitty flask won’t ruin her mold. Causing her to commit adrenaline-augmented, justifiable homicide. As an accessory, I don’t know if I could dissuade her from also pounding my head into the foundry’s cement floor.

The three extra buckets I made prove to be just enough to envelope Jimmy’s piece. The older mixture doesn’t harden, forming a parting line. But the bottom of the mold is a little too close for comfort. The sculpture department’s own Archimedes decides to raise the level of the investment by displacing the still liquid mixture with four ordinary red bricks. The fire bricks that the burnout kiln is made out of would expand less during firing. But they’re a bit coveted around here (READ: if our professor saw fire brick stuck in a mold he would assault Bad Jimmy verbally to the point that his first born would be lucky not to be born deaf). He says, I think I’ll be able to get the out.

Juah, on her knees pounding resin sand, looks at me skeptically. I look at her in a similar fashion. Probably, I tell him with a shrug.

Again, not my problem. There’s a pizza place with a large one topping for five dollars on Tuesdays. I think I’ll get one and eat the whole thing.

Just thought I’d post this since I found it on a drive while looking for an unrelated image. I find it quite funny and wasn’t previously able to locate it through the usual methods.

Apologies to whoever actually made it.

I just added some high resolution images to my portfolio. I also pared down the blogroll a while ago but that’s always been pretty useless. Oh yeah, I deleted some writing I didn’t like anymore. Also useless stuff. The art is what’s important. I keep some of my best dust on it.