It’s a print making factory over here.
It was a beautiful day and what better way to spend it than by playing with wood. No, not that wood. I’m talking about pine. I use pine for a lot of paintings and for all of my prints. The last couple of days I’ve been consumed with preparing for the show on Saturday. As if I wasn’t busy enough I thought it would be fun (as in oodles) to document my print making experience for all of you. When I speak of “you” what I am referring to is the 3,300 readers my imagination has invented that visit this page every single day. And sometimes even twice a day. Of course, there are the stalkers too. You know, the ones that check for updates here 7-10 times every thirty minutes. That’s right, I was thinking of you fine folks when I assigned myself the task of documenting this activity. Unfortunately, (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) there are a few steps here and there that were skipped for one or two or all of the following reasons.
– I forgot to take a picture.
– I did not feel like taking a picture.
– I was so involved in my “work” that I could not bring myself to stop for the 2-3 seconds it would have taken me to push that little button on my camera.
– The particular step in the process was just to heartbreakingly boring to subject you, my faithful 3,300 readers, to.
– I was feeling lightheaded due to drinking a bottle of wine with Seamas The International Traveling Street Poet.
(More about that at a later date.)
– Too high on spray paint fumes to differentiate one step from the next as they all seem to blend into one GIANT step*. For mankind.
Lots of wood pieces. Some painted. Some not painted yet. I used to paint the edges with a paintbrush, but I recently grew some brains and started spray painting the edges. Making this discovery is good and bad. Good because it saves me time. Bad because the time it saves me is actually killing me. The paint fumes that sneak their way into my body could be shaving minutes off my life. The very minutes I so proudly went about saving. If I live to be 100, which I intend to, it will most likely even out. If a disgruntled postman is hellbent on shooting me in the face tomorrow, well, I’ll be happy knowing I saved up enough minutes to write this.
After the edges are painted I glue the prints on the wood. These are nice prints, by the way. None of that home printer ink jet crap. These are done in a professional photo lab on real photo paper. Not that pretend photo paper you’ve been tricked into thinking is real by Staple’s employees. None of that here. These are The Real McCoy.
Epoxy resin. Yummy. I dare you to drink this. Chances are if you did you wouldn’t live to tell about it. This resin always makes me think of one of the torture tactics from Stona Fitch’s “Senseless”. Please take note of my sexy latex gloves. What could possibly drop panties faster than a nice attractive pair of latex gloves?
Now I pour the resin on the print. I’ve found that a business card torn in half is the best tool to use in the back and forth spreading of resin. Luckily, these business cards are not completely wasted. Not only do they make a wonderful tool, but when the job is done they can be used for my Senior Thesis on the Structural Integrity And Aesthetic Soundness Of Spontaneously Constructed Torn Business Card Fabrications.
My torn business card sculpture now proudly weighs in at eight inches tall. Interestingly enough, Ron Jeremy’s penis is approximately one inch longer than my sculpture is tall.
* Yes, I know the correct quote is “giant LEAP for mankind.”
