Hello again.  It's been a while.  Quite a lot has happened in the last month and a half.  The base was the first thing I dealt with after my last post.  I cleaned off all the rusty spots, removing the patina around every one of the nail heads.  I put a spot of Rustoleum over each of them.  It covered pretty well, but when it dried, you could still see bits of the nail and I didn't want to risk any more rust, so the next night I added a second dab to each.  I gave them a couple nights to dry and then reapplied the patina to those areas.  It looked like it was working for a little while, but by the time I woke up the next day, they had turned brown again.  Not as bad as the first time, but still pretty bad.  Although I had cleaned up around each of the nails, the rust had leached much further into the surrounding patina than what I had cleaned off.  Now it was working its way back into the new, still damp areas.  Bummer.  At least the Rustoleum was working.  I decided at that point to completely remove the patina from the entire top surface of the base.  That was probably overkill, but I figured that way I would know I had removed all the rust.  I put a wire brush on my dremel, donned my goggles and particle mask, and over the next few nights, worked my way through every nook and cranny of the wrinkled copper, removing every bit of patina I could.

At this point, I also decided something had gone terribly wrong with the green patina on the body.  It had been almost two months and nothing was changing.  No rust was forming, no variations in color coming out of the green.  It looked as if I had spray painted her.  I had gone over her about five times with a tooth brush by this point, exposing bits of the steel in a few spots, but nothing was changing.  I started to panic a little.  Art walk was coming up in less than a month and this was NOT how she was supposed to look, and by my estimation, she would be no closer by the time it arrived.  I wracked my brain to figure out what I could have done wrong.  All the samples I had done in the months prior looked great.  The hair looked great.  It was just the green body.  The only difference I could think of was that I had used a sponge to wipe it on the samples, because they were small and I could get the sponge to touch all the surfaces.  But when I applied it to the body, I used a small artists paintbrush so I could cover all the hard to reach areas.  It was obvious that the oxides went on fine.  It was definitely green.  It was the acid, that for some reason, was not working.  The two will separate in the container if left untouched.  Thick green sludge on the bottom, dark watery acid on top.  I kept it mixed fairly well with a wire whisk while I was painting it on though.  I finally determined that I had probably been dipping the brush too deep, swabbing the green oxides off the bottom of the container.  The bristles (as opposed to the sponge I used on the samples) must have sopped up all the green, but when I pulled the brush out, the acid didn't stick to it at all.  This seemed to make sense.  I basically just painted it green. 

I came to this conclusion a day or so before leaving town for a long weekend.  I was going out to the desert to help some friends with their projects for the Coachella music festival.  Before I left, I took the container of the green patina, carefully opened it without mixing it up, dipped my brush into the acid, careful not to get any of the green oxides on the brush, and painted it onto her achilles heel.  By the time I got back from Coachella a few days later, that little strip of metal had begun changing color and was starting to look like the samples had after the first few days.  That was it.  The samples had taken about a month to reach the point I wanted them to, and at this point, there were only a few weeks left til Art Walk, so I was already behind the curve.  I carefully opened the container and repainted the entire body with a layer of the acid.  A few days later, I gave it a second coat.  A few days after that, you could see the variations in the green, and after about a week, rust was starting to form on all the exposed areas.  Victory.

Last thing to do before art walk was reapply the patina to the base.  This time, with the nails covered in Rustoleum, and no rusty patina left on the copper, it worked beautifully. 

By the time Art Walk rolled around, the piece was looking good.  Still pretty green, but at least a nice mix of varying shades, with spots of rust beginning to show.  I may add one more coat of acid, somewhere along the way, but I'm guessing in another few weeks to a month, she should be where I want her and ready for a final clear coat.  And then… done done.  Like, totally, completely done.  Very exciting.

I'll post some photos soon, but here's a little teaser from art walk.  I guess I can finally announce the name here too. 

shake dreams from your hair

2013

Writing this blog has been an interesting experience.  On one hand, it's been really fun doing something new and sharing my process.  On the other hand, writing has always been tough for me.  As simple as these blog posts are, they usually take me a few nights of writing, editing, rewriting and on and on until I finally beat the words out of myself.  I'm not sure if I'll keep this up with any future projects.  Maybe.  But if not, the one thing I will definitely miss is posting music.  Music is such a huge part of my process that it's been more fun posting these tracks than it has the updates.  Definitely easier.  This past month, I've still been listening to Alt-J and Jim James, but I've also been listening to some new-to-me bands, Exitmusic and Now, Now.  I've also dug back into another recent favorite from the last year, Nightlands.  I had wanted to post a few tracks from Exitmusic and Nightlands for you, but for some reason it won't let me post either of the songs I wanted to share.  So instead, I'll post this.  I heard this song on a cassette called An American Prayer the summer I graduated from high school.  It was an album of Jim Morrison reading his poetry, with background music written by the Doors after he died.  I loved the Doors back then.  Can't say I'm still a big fan, but the lyrics at the beginning of this song struck me as incredibly beautiful, and have stuck with me for over twenty years.  When I started working on this piece, I realized why they've stuck with me for so long.  They held the title of my sculpture.

That's all for now.  I'll check back in, hopefully with more photos, once the patina is finished and I do the clear coat.

Well, it's been four weeks since I applied the patina.  Turns out this part, being patient, has been the toughest part of the whole process.  The color hasn't changed much since I applied it.  It did get a little lighter and there has been some slight discoloration in a few areas, but really, if you weren't obsessively combing over every inch of it, every day, you wouldn't have noticed.  Impatience finally got the best of me about a week ago.  I decided to start working it over with a tooth brush.  I brushed off quite a bit of excess patina, all of it coming off in little green clouds, but for as much as I was removing the excess, I was also rubbing the powder into the metal.  I've done it three times now, and there are some small areas of raw metal showing throughout the piece, but there really hasn't been much rust happening.  It rained a few nights this week, so I moved it next to the door both nights in hopes that the moisture in the air might give it a little push.  It does look a lot better than it did a month ago, but it's still really green.

I also decided it was finally time to apply the blue patina to the copper foiled base.  As expected, it created a beautiful mix of varying shades of blue, which definitely softened the green of the sculpture.  Without that sharp contrast against the shiny copper, the green looks a little more… natural?  However, one problem has popped up.  The copper coated nails, which I was hoping would just blend in with the copper foil, are actually leaving rusty greenish brown spots in the blue patina.  The copper coating must not have survived, or maybe it was too thin.  Either way, the steel under the copper coating is reacting to the patina and leaving rust spots.  Didn't see that coming.  If it were more organic looking, I *might* be able to roll with it, but it's not.  It's following a few different patterns of nails.  This will not do.  My girlfriend suggested cleaning the affected areas off, putting a dab of rustoleum over the nail heads and trying to reapply the patina to those areas.  I tried it on one nail in the back last night and reapplied the patina tonight and it seems to have worked.  I cleaned off the other nails tonight and will give it a shot with the rest of them this week.  Hopefully that'll solve the problem.

Funny.  The part I want to rust isn't rusting, and the part I didn't expect or want to rust, is rusting.  Well, I'll keep you posted.

I've spent the better part of the last month listening to three albums: The debut releases from Alt-J and Django Django, and the solo disc from Jim James of My Morning Jacket.  I wasn't a fan of MMJ when I first heard them about 6 or 7 years ago, but I'm going to have to give them another shot… when I can finally stop listening to his solo disc.  Beautiful and haunting, this is the first song I heard from it and I was immediately enamored.

Well, this will probably be my last post for another month or so.  The patina has been applied to the sculpture, the base has been wrapped in copper, and now it's time for patience to come into play. 

I used two different colored patinas so far: red and green.  I painted the green on the body, but the hair is way too dense to really get a brush or sponge in deep enough to give it a good coat, so the red needed to be sprayed on.  Since the clear coat will eventually be sprayed on as well, I built a makeshift spray booth for this part of the process.  It's basically just a huge cube made of steel pipe and speed rail fittings that I had laying around, with thin plastic drop cloths for walls. 

The hair was first, so I wrapped the entire body, except for the hair, with more drop cloths, being especially careful around the hairline.  I had to be be sure the red wouldn't bleed over onto the face, the ears or anything else.  I wrapped any little curls that I could, tucked the plastic through open spaces that were too small to wrap and even slipped some small sheets of the plastic inside the face to protect that surface as well.

The red went on really easily.  It's shockingly red when you first put it on, but within a week, it starts to mellow and a nice, darker, richer red starts to come out.

I knew painting the green on the body was going to take some time, so I waited til Friday night to start.  It ended up taking me about eight hours on Friday night and an additional four hours on Saturday night.  I used sponge paint brushes (like you'd use to paint a wall) to get most of the outer surface, then had to use little portrait style paint brushes to get the insides and hard to reach areas.  It was tedious work, but I eventually covered the entire surface area of the piece.  And boy, is it green.  I've done tests and I know it always starts this way before the green lightens up and the rust starts, but having worked on this piece for as long as I have, to see her look so very, very green is a little alarming.  So, as I said, this is where the patience comes in.

The last bit that I was able to do for now was to cover the base with the wrinkled copper foil.  This will eventually get covered in a blue patina, but I need to wait to apply that until I see if I need to rework the patina on the body.  If I need to brush off some of the green, or reapply more, I don't want it to ruin the blue on the base.  Putting the copper on the base was kind of like putting a puzzle together.  The foil isn't wide enough to cover the base in one piece, and even if it was, the feet would be in the way, so I ended up overlapping seven different shaped pieces on the top, nailing them in with small copper nails, and finished it with the long strip around the outer edge that I made a few months ago.  The trickiest parts were cutting a nice tight fit around the toes, and not hitting the nails already holding the base together or the steel box tube inside with these new copper nails.  It took me two nights to complete, but it looks really good.  Can't wait to see it with the patina on it.

So now I wait.  I will, of course, keep you posted when things start to move forward again.  Until then...

I stumbled across this beautiful song mixed into a really gorgeous Burning Man time lapse video and immediately fell in love with it.  Don't know much about the group at all, and I'm pretty sure this isn't an official video, but it's weird and fits the music really well.

Wow.  My last post was December 2nd.  Two months ago.  Well, I had decided I wasn't going to post again until the hair was done.  It took about twice as long as I expected it to (surprise surprise), but to be fair, that two months included my birthday, Christmas, New Years, my gf's birthday and our anniversary.  Two months is still two months though.  But... I've finally finished the hair, which means the sculpting phase of this project is finally finished!

Not really sure what to say about the hair.  It's long and wavy, so I got to bend a lot of really fun curves.  Like every other aspect of this sculpture, it was incredibly challenging.  I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do going into it.  Some things worked and others didn't.  I did things, cut them off and redid them.  I burnt through a bunch of wires and deserved to have my mouth washed out with soap every time.

Since I didn't give her a scalp, all her hair comes directly off her hairline.  I started at the back of the neck and started working my way up to her ears.  I didn't try to make each wire represent a single hair.  Instead, I used a few wires at a time to swirl around themselves, creating thick curls flowing down her back.  I let a pretty twist of hair drip down from her temples in front of each ear.  The rest of the hair in front swoops over/around her head, except for a few strands on her right side that spill over her shoulder and down onto her breast.  That turned out to be a really nice touch.  The hair does a beautiful job of shaping her head.   Grinding got to be tricky towards the end, but I managed to get my dremel in each time.  It was fun watching the open areas fill in, every wire bringing me one step closer to being done.  It was especially exciting, if not a little jarring, when I reached the point where I could tell exactly how many wires I had left to attach.  It's been almost sixteen months since I started this, and it feels great being this close to finished.

Once the hair was done, I noticed that two welds had broken in the face.  I assume it was from all the vibration while I was grinding down the welds in her hair.  I freaked out when I saw it because now that the whole head is closed in, I thought there'd be no way for me to get in to weld and grind inside the face.  Fortunately, I was able to fit the welder into an opening in the cheek and and the dremel through her eyelid, and fix up both welds pretty cleanly. 

I went over the whole piece and found some spots that needed a little more grinding to smooth them out, and when I was done, I used an air compressor to blow off the metal dust that's been collecting in all the crevices over the last sixteen months.  Next I sprayed it with vinegar and cleaned off a thin layer of rust that had started to form in some areas.  

I also added small rubber feet under the base.  It was sitting flush with the floor and I was worried that once I added the copper and patina to the base it might chip off when I moved it around or tried to tip it to pick it up.  It's now hovering about a half inch over the floor, and not only will it be safer now, it also looks really cool like that.

So patinas are next.  I'm going to do the hair first.  I'll report back shortly.

Been listening to a lot of new music these last few months.  Went to a couple great shows and made a mix tape for my girl.  This song kept coming back to me though.  This is the first single from Foals' upcoming cd, Holy Fire.  So good.  I've been cranking this one pretty loud.