Moping

• April 25th, 2006 • 0 Comments • studio 4A •

I swore I’d never be mopey on the studio blog, but I can’t help it. Michael and I talked in depth about what to do concerning the studio last night. There are several options, but I’m not happy with the one that is most-likely.

1) Find out why there is a problem with having an art studio in an apartment garage. I pay money, why should they care? Fight the damn problem. Pro: I get my way. Con: We rock the boat, the manager ‘blacklists’ us within the complex making for a miserable living experience the next year.

2) Move out when the lease is up. Pro: We move into a rent house with cheaper rent and whee! I get a huge-ass garage to muddle around in. Con: It’s MOVING (do you know how much our cumulative crap is?). We were gonna move out in another year into our OWN house. Our first purchased house together.

3) Move out MOST of the studio junk so I can park my car inside, thereby rendering the studio an official car-hole, with stuff stored next to the parking space. Pro: I get rid of a bunch of junk I needed to get rid of anyway, thereby preempting a major clean-out which will come when we move out in a year. Con: Great. There’s a freakin’ CAR parked in the middle of the studio.

Number three is the most likely, just because moving out a year early is kind of a silly thing to do, and there is no where to PUT the stuff. Yes, my car will be all safe in its new home, but most studio activity will have to take place in the bathroom. Ug ug and double ug. I am a mopey artist, except now I don’t have a studio to mope in. I’ll have to mope up where the computer is and pester my husband. Maybe I’ll start wearing black and doing dreary paintings about how bleak and hopeless the world is…

Is the end near?

• April 24th, 2006 • 0 Comments • studio 4A •

Uh oh! I mentioned earlier that the apartment complex was threatening the studio. I spoke with an agent and everything seemed in the clear, though she seemed inclined to tip-toe around mentioning it to the owner. Well wouldncha know it, when I was opening the garage this evening the owner herself was strolling by.

Busted.

Long story short, she said that I could keep my stuff where it is until the lease is up. My husband and I are not happy about this, as we were expecting to stay at least another year. And just when I cleaned the studio all spic and span for the summertime! Ultimately, this will probably be the demise of 4A, but the birth of a new studio, wherever it may be.

Spring Cleaning

• April 21st, 2006 • 0 Comments • experiments, studio 4A •

Ahhhh. The studio is finally clean and organized. It’s pretty much been a disaster area since last summer, when I helped my parents move out of their house of 20+ years. In the final days of packing, a lot of items were moved to my garage temporarily. There is some corollary of Parkinson’s Law that states something to the effect of: stuff will multiply such that it fills all available space, irrespective of how much stuff or space there is. I think this is even more true when someone moves. Soon after my parents moved, I started student teaching and the studio was all but forgotten as it was filled to the brim with boxes and whatnot. Immediately after student teaching came the holidays, during which I was planning a wedding! The weather lately has been most conducive to being outside so FINALLY, 4A is clean.

Good thing, too! I’ve had a few projects brewing in my brain so having some working space will do me just fine. One of my projects I’m not sure what to do with, though. I had a plot to cut up some of the many many circuit-boards and computer parts in attempt to make jewelry. Cutting up a video card was fairly difficult with the Dremel; the cutting wheel protested several points and I dared not cut though anything other than board as I was unsure as to the contents of those little transistor-looking things. (That’s a technical term.) This endeavor made a helluva mess! There was powder everywhere, and it did not like being swept up. (Yes, I was wearing a respirator and goggles!) A little too late I found a source saying what’s actually in those circuit boards.

Printed Circuit Boards contain heavy metals such as Antimony, Silver, Chromium, Zinc, Lead, Tin and Copper. According to some estimates there is hardly any other product for which the sum of the environmental impacts of raw material, extraction, industrial, refining and production, use and disposal is so extensive as for printed circuit boards. Exerpt from The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition

Whooooa nelly! Take a look at some of the lists on that site for all the nasty things in there! No way in hell I’m setting the Dremel loose on ‘em now; heck, I would feel bad about simply hucking my piles of parts into the trash as well. Their purpose has been for making wearables for so long, I can’t get my mind to thinking about something else; I’ll have to grind the ol’ clutch on this one.

Airbrush Antics

• April 6th, 2006 • 0 Comments • airbrushing, supplies •

As both my husband and I are interested in using the airbrushes we found for different purposes, it was decided after much muddled debate to purchase an air compressor specifically for airbrushing. My previous scheme to buy a regular ol’ hardware store compressor did not seem feasible upon investigating various models. (It didn’t seem like a good idea to hook up something capable of >200psi to a delicate device.) The fellow at the hobby store we frequent was quite helpful and confirmed my suspicions: if I bought a cheap compressor, I would need to buy all sorts of adapters, scrubbers, regulators and so forth so that the cost would end up more than a mid-grade compressor. So, I chose the lovely 50s green-colored Paasche D100. Hooray!

Excitedly, I got home and hooked up the hose and brush, carefully filling the cup with some brown watercolor. After flicking on the switch the brush produced only a few spits of paint. Rather anti-climatic considering all the hard work I invested in cleaning the damned brush! So I check connections, I re-clean openings, pull out the needle and polish it shiny. Nothing. Upon reaching down to check the connection again I noticed a direct breeze on my wrist coming from the hose! Well! Obviously living in a garage frequented by mice leaves tubes open to being munched on. I never noticed as the hose is covered with cloth. Ah me!

A friend and I discussed online the distinct need for all-night art/craft/hobby supply stores. Tomorrow, we’ll give this a try once more!

Wow!!

• April 3rd, 2006 • 0 Comments • Uncategorized •

I’m in danger of hyperventilating. Poking around on eBay is rarely a good thing, and I just discovered that Spirograph made a SUPER SPIROGRAPH model #2400. My God! It has about a million pieces; many of which appear to be modular to construct gigantic designs! I may have to break my former rule of only purchasing items with “Buy It Now” on them. Oh boy oh boy oh boy!

Programmer, I am not.

• April 3rd, 2006 • 0 Comments • photography •

As it is 2:00am, I figure I am justifiably exhausted after completing the initial skeleton for the Epicycloid Galleries. This project is massive with a capital ‘M.’ When I embarked on creating these, I don’t think I had much of a concept for how many simple combinations there are for the damned drawing machines! (This is despite the fact I did a handmade book depicting each combination for one of my Spirographs.) Programming this thing is a beast: someone with real know-how of PHP or .ASP or something would probably be done already. Me? I turtle along, cobbling together JavaScript snippets as best I can. Thank GOD I got DreamWeaver working with Pearl or I’d be done for!

In the meantime, I hope to catch up on my drawings and actually DO an Epicycloid-A-Day to get that blog going. Or maybe I should worry about getting some sleep? Whew!