wednesday 5/23 - revised expectations

Despite my hurried efforts, it has become clear over the past few days that I did not have time to complete four pieces in the amount of depth and detail that I planned. Instead, I am only capable of completing 2 whole pieces in the time of senior projects. This is wholly due to my drastic misjudgment of the time required to create what I imagined from scratch, not a lack of effort or persistance.

The threading process continued for most of the day on wednesday. I slowly added more layers, thickened the colors, and experimented with different stringing patterns (you'd be surprised how many different ways you can create the same curve!)

This is how the final mathematics piece looks (better in person):

I periodically took time to pull prints of the coins for the nixon background. After 3 pulls (drying in between), the background was covered using a silver and gold blend. After finishing these prints and cleaning, I added the last major message to the piece. This is the anti-war slogan that I painted over the 60's outer space scene. The letters read "GET THE HELL OUT OF VIETNAM" in sloppy font that is supposed to mimic a hand painted picket sign.

This is how each looks:

the last thing to do is attach borders to the wood!

tuesday 5/21

at school - 8:30 - 3:30
at home - 5:00 - 6:30, 8:30 - 9:30

I got a lot done today. first thing in the morning after arriving at school around 8:30, I finished setting up the math board by hammering 117 nails. This took a very long time due to difficulty properly spacing the nails with the t-square, but in the end they turned out pretty well.

I re-shot the open screen for the green/white blend behind Reagan, and then began shooting the coin pattern in gold and silver. the piece as a whole is finishing up nicely.

Lastly I started threading my designs onto the nails. this is how it looks as of an hour or so ago:

monday 5/20

without access to my car, I could not transport the large boards to school to work, so I decided to work from home today and come in to school tomorrow instead.

I worked at home in the morning. I sprayed 2 layers to the last stencil on the 50's section of the baby crawling away from the atomic bomb.

Next, I created the space background for the 60's section. This took some time due to the number of coats necessary to create the right colors and texture of the planets with spray paint. This is how it looks as of now:

 

After that, I came into school at 1:30 and copied a graphic to represent coins onto transparent acetate. I arranged three of them in line, and shot them onto a screen to go around Reagan's face. I'm planning on re-pulling an open screen for the green and white blend (I am not happy with the way it turned out) and then pull the new screen in a gold and silver blend (streaking in the other direction from the green/white). This will balance the aesthetic organization of the piece as a whole while adding to the representation of "tacky materialism".

 

 

Finally, I sketched my design ideas for the threading of the math piece in order to verify my plans. This is what I am playing with as of now:

 

 

thursday 5/16 AND friday 5/17

forgot to post yesterday.

Thursday: I was on campus with Ms. Blum from 9:45 until 3:30
I finished printing all three color separation of the lips onto the fifties section. I also finished 3 more colors on the 70's splatter (yellow, pink, and light blue)
I also got the black cloth stretched and stapled over the 2' x 2' board for calculus. This required swapping staple guns from mine to Ms. Boswick's (which was working much better) and buying new staples from the hardware store.

Friday: Worked from home. Started around 8 and worked until 12 (went to speak on a college-process panel at school until 2:30) then I worked again from 3 until 5:30.
I re-cut and finished spraying (both layers) of 3 out of 4 stencils (atomic bomb, nixon, and reagan). I still have to spray the crawling baby stencil, although I have already carved both layers. I also created the repetition graphic representing money/coins and sized it to be shot and pulled quickly over the 80's background in GOLD. it will look very tacky 80's, symbolize the shift in focus toward monetary wealth, and by providing a gridded detailed structure on the right end it will balance with the checkers on the far left.

here are a few pictures of recent details:

wednesday 5/15

at school hours: 9am - 3:30pm
(plus purchasing materials for an hour after that and blogging now)

Productive day.

Started with shooting the checker background, then printing it 3 different times to cover the section. the result looks like this:

it created the right look for the background i was intending, although i new it would be way to hectic (given how small the squares are) to add an image to the other half of the squares (the white checkers right now). So I'm leaving the background as it is, and have created a full size graphic of the lips and zipper that I was gonna use for the checker. At the end of the day today I shot those three color separations on a new screen so I'm ready to silkscreen it tomorrow morning.





Somewhere in between that, I gesso'd the 70's section (the white base), then gave it a coat of gloss medium. I began the splattering process for the background, but it takes time because if you let each color dry before splattering the next, the acrylics wont blend where the wet globs meet. I allowed for some of this with the black and red, but waited for complete dry before the blue. Tomorrow I'll be layering pink and yellow and possibly more.

After leaving school I went to "Creative Paints" to get the right nails, and "Fabrix" to get loose black cloth for the calculus piece. It's going to be staple gunned to the board, then I'll add nails and begin stringing designs between them. Plan to be done by the end of the weekend. (Media piece done by friday) 

tuesday 5/14

9am - 4pm

Today was very productive. I got to school and began transferring some print outs to acetate for the screen that Ms. Blum and I also prepared for tomorrow.
Next I drove down to DISCOUNT Builder's Supply at Mission and Duboce. I had a 4' x 8' sheet of 3/4" Poplar wood cut into two 6' x 2' rectangles, and two 2' x 2' squares.

Once I got the wood back to school, and moved up to the art room, I resized the Nixon and Reagan stencils to a smaller size to fit the new wood. Then I cut out both of the stencils with the soldering-iron/xacto-knife in entirety. This took time and precision


late lunch.

After that, I began priming the wood of the history piece with gesso and acrylic. It is white gesso on the far left, blue and black acrylic paint to the right of that. On the far left, I used a paper in the shape of the Reagan stencil to cover the area where the stencil will be on the wood. I then took an open screen (no emulsion) to  pull a blend of green and white ink. I used the rim of the plastic cup holding the green ink to arrange green on the screen before it was pulled at the suggestion of Ms. Blum. The way you arrange your paints on the screen before a blend completely determines the way the colors appear across the print, and where they are solid, streak, blended, etc. This is how the board looked at the end of today, when I cleaned up and left around 3:45

making up for sick time

I spent a lot of time today continuing to learn multiple algorithmic programs for writing, and rendering abstract graphic images. After hours of enhancing my understanding of what is essentially code writing, I came to the realization that this was not really what I'm going for. As cool as it can look, it had little to do with calculus, leaving the mathematical evaluation to a program that simply follows rules about where to put boxes.

The breakthrough was STRING ART

I have completely changed my plan for the Calculus representational piece, and it will work perfectly with my project, in my opinion. Now that I am planning to use wood sheets instead of canvas, I will be able to arrange nails in a simple geometric design on the wood. Then I will use different colors of string to wrap around the nails in different designs in order to create curves and shapes from equations and rules. The results will be hand crafted, rather than a digital image then transferred to reality, and therefore will be much more aesthetically appealing. I am very excited about this development, and already have ideas for how to get it done. I will be talking to Ms. Blum about this idea in person when we next meet on tuesday.

Back to History through Media

I also spent a chunk of time today developing images for the history piece. I have sketches to be be further developed into a checkered acetate color separation for the other half of the background with the  marlboro hammer and sickle. I also began draft sketches for the baby stencil to be used over this background.

And Labyrinths

I began organizing my ideas from this class for the English piece. I also continued my reading on the topic of visual note-taking, useful graphics to utilize, and other tips and tricks for organizing information in this unique format. I've started sketches, but there is much more sketching and 'doodling' to come.

GOALS FOR THIS PAST WEEK / NEXT WEEK: I have met my goals for the week in that I have a rough plan for how each piece is going to look, whether it has been accurately conveyed through my blog or not. Not everything I create and or decide makes it onto this page. I will be CONSTRUCTING this week. I hope to finish 2 pieces by the end of this week of hard work (history through media and one of the other 3).