My body is complaining, but it means I’m staying ahead of the bills … that is until I go to the dentist.

I’ve been working on a painting in my spare moments … a scene from Tree of Trees which is on a large(ish) canvas, 30” x 30”, so it’s going to take a while. I need something for the kitchen wall as I intend repainting the kitchen too at some point.

I put my sculpture on Etsy, but no sales as yet….

Meanwhile I’ve been posting stuff that amuses or inspires me on Facebook which is a lazy way of ‘publishing’…. and neglecting my blog.

Inworldz has had me logging in as an alt. There are a couple of teams doing suggestion-builds for new welcome centres and it all has to be done top secret with no ‘maker’ names on the prims in case some people get all huffy about favouritism and other such crap. “political correctness gone mad” … well… it’s been a bit of fun.

There are times in life when you just keep your head down and carry on, and that’s OK too, we can’t all ‘headline’ continually … in spite of our Celeb Culture. I couldn’t think of anything worse, actually, that having to ‘perform’ every minute of every day … what a nightmare!

So, my big news involves getting a new work jacket and a new TV as they both bust in the same week …

Anyway … all good really..

hugz

:))

For those of you who haven’t followed the making process of this tree [it's made of resin and nylon fishing line] then there are details here.

This is how it turned out…

Now… the advice that Miso gave me to use the self-timer to stop any camera shake was good, but… my camera thinks that a black background means it has to automatically use the flash. The next set shows the pearlised resin on the trunk better even tho the canopy is a little harder to see.

So, the colours worked out better without the flash …except… the canopy has glitter embedded in the resin which is very noticeable in reality. So…need for some more snaps…

First a close-up of the trunk altho the pearlised resin is a slightly warmer colour than shown here in the detail…

The following 3 are attempts to show the glitter…

…you can just about make out some green, top right on the photo above..

…and the following one, outdoors, shows the colour best but the autofocus got itself confused…

Anyway, overall you get an idea of how it turned out. All these snaps will appear on Flickr in due course for a better look.

So… I bought some plaster yesterday.

Time for a new one…

:))

It’s a striving for perfection that is doomed, I guess. Flat surfaces are never totally flat and square edges are never square unless you are a machine … and I hate machine finishes.

So… aiming for a happy medium, where I am satisfied enough that the slight flaws won’t haunt me til my dying day. It still takes ages. I’m hard to please.

Anyway, the good news is that I’m now finished. I’m writing this after my penultimate varnish layer has gone on and I’m just waiting for it to dry, plucking out the suicidal insects that mistake resin for amber and wish to be eternally encased in plastic.

I’m happy with the result, which is the only thing that matters, but I’m impatient to get going on my new project and so I’ll breathe a sigh of relief when I’m done.

I did go to visit the glass workshop where they have a kiln or two I can hire, it took an hour in the car each way and it was closed when I got there…

I’ll blog some photos in a few days, as soon as it’s all dry.

Otherwise I’ve been quite busy, I’m not used to working 5 days a week, it’s very time-consuming. I’ve been playing Scrabble with Jay Jay but haven’t been inworld much this last month.

It’s a year since I started playing Empire Avenue too, and, apart from the mild amusement it affords me, I am at a loss as to why I continue. Social media, in general, seem to be a complete waste of time and I really don’t know why I participate.

In the ‘real’ world Spring has finally arrived and I’ve been buying plants, planting trees and sowing seed. Most of the gardens I look after I have managed to knock into shape over the past few years but the new ones have still got a long way to go.

I’ve been doing lots of fencing… deer, rabbits, badgers, moles and pigeons are all a pain, mice too. Some clients can be, too…. but can’t fence them out.

I haven’t even started on my own garden yet. Got many tons of horse muck delivered last month and it’s sitting on the beds, breeding mushrooms, and waiting for me to dig it all in. Tomorrow promises to be warm !!! so I’ll have to get out there and get some stuff into the ground … I have plants in the pots they moved in, in, and the poor things need space.

Things are pretty OK though, I had a birthday since I last blogged and I’m older now … yes, I’m an Aries. Probably not much wiser tho… never mind.

Not knowing what the hell I’m doing has never troubled me before…

:))

While my sculpture is dragging to it’s conclusion I’ve started work on my next project, a glass bowl.

I have the idea to make an orchid shaped bowl as my first venture into glass work and so needed to make a plaster template as the first step.

Now, as it’s quite a complicated shape to mould my first problem was creating a well shaped former to pour the plaster into. After mulling over the options I have gone for a paper mould, well, paper and cardboard.

I had a bit of foam board left over from my previous piece and, having once been quite handy with foam board and glue (I made architectural models to help pay my way through college) I thought I’d give it a go.

I then covered the outside with strips of paper and wood glue

..and painted the inside with a gloss paint… would it hold?

Yep, it went OK….

and after drying it out a bit on the radiator I took the mould off.

So, I put it back in the airing cupboard and will begin working on it next week. It needs to be perfect as it’s going to be the master template for a refractory mould. A refractory mould is one that gets filled with molten glass and is only used once. Having the master template means that I can repeat the whole thing should it all go horribly wrong.

Anyway it feels great to have started my adventures into glass, and I have a second glass project in my head ready to go too.

Shame I have to work for a living..

:))

Wizzy watching my goats poo.

SXSW was treated to a special show by some of us in Inworldz, and Wizzy’s E8 attracted quite a bit of attention by all accounts. The Virtual Worlds ‘industry’ sent representatives and Inworldz was there to show off the grid.

I’ve been following the Oculus development with some interest as I think it will be a real ‘game-changer’, a thought shared by many in ‘the industry’ I understand. If you haven’t heard about it, it’s 3D goggles….for want of a simplification…….more here.

…and I’ve been sandpapering. My canopy is finished apart from a finishing coat of varnish and it has a sprinkling of glitter. So, apart from the invasive scent of horse poo permeating my house, there are the odd flecks of glitter which have migrated from the workshop and are to be found on my person and clothing reminding me of a visit by Pixi many years ago which left sequins secreted in odd corners like a little blessing from the fae.

June seems like a long time ago, and it is. I started my new sculpture then, after I got my RA rejection and I’ve been working on it ever since.

My “I bought a piece of wood” blog was therefore a bit of a milestone. The wood wasn’t as important as the fact that another stage of my piece was about to start after the painstaking process of building up nylon fishing line, with layer upon thin layer of transparent resin.

Well, with just a few layers to go, I am about to go to the woodwork stage of my piece. Forming a base is a bit like framing a painting, it’s a pseudo-finish. Like framing, the base can effect the finished piece badly if not well proportioned etc, but a painting can always be reframed as a new base can be made for the sculpture.

Not many people would understand the pleasure in finding a new piece of P60 (3M) sandpaper hiding in the dark but then my life has been pretty full of sandpaper (and muck). I wouldn’t say I’ve been a major sponsor of the sandpaper industry but I’ve helped keep them afloat.

I’m still a Luddite when it comes to sandpapering machines, the effect of hand work is visually obvious to me and, probably, subconsciously registered by the average viewer. It just looks a little more pleasing to see slight deviations from the geometrically perfect (unless you are doing a Wizzy-style piece).

So, developing muscles like a tomb raider and acting out scenes from Karate Kid will be my lot for the next few weeks …. the main reason for my anti-social neglect of (not-so-very) social media this past while…

…. I’ll keep you posted.

Time to visit the woodyard for a bit of wood for the base of my sculpture.

“Home of Wood” is really just a very large shed behind the Rye Spice Company in a seedy part of Rye. Now Rye is one of those places that look like a Disney stereotype of Olde Englande ….as you can see. In a ‘chicken and egg’ [which came first..] conundrum recently the shopping and the restaurants have gone very upmarket and a fair proportion of gay couples have moved in…. but down by the [ex] dockyard (it is no longer a port, really) there are still some old sheds.

I met an old man in this rusting corrugated-iron lean-to and eventually decided on a nice piece of English beech with very few air-miles attached…. it comes from a local tree.

The first cut took me an hour, the second took longer… by then I was right out of arm juice and went and had a bath, putting the piece of wood in the airing cupboard to dry and hopefully not crack.

The idea is to stain it quite dark grey/black and varnish it with pearlised varnish.

I am still awaiting the arrival of my pearlised white resin after the first delivery turned out to be wrong. However, as the company told me to keep the wrong product while they would send me the right one, it’s all worked out quite well.

I have to clear the work bench for seedlings, so there is a bit of a deadline, which is good as it gives me a bit of kick up the proverbial.

More later… when my arm has recovered.

:))

…namely this one, the base for my new RL tree…. but the prices….wow…

For those of you unfamiliar with the Euro …..it’s about the same as the dollar…so… $750 to $300 … yikes…. might have to wait a few years…

:))

Some photos on Flickr..

Ziki’s blog has a little better information if you can’t make the show.

In other news…. well, the build I did at the library in Inworldz has been very well documented by Alexina Procter who has compiled a little catalogue of artists involved…..here…… very well done, and thanks to Alex.

In RL, 5 years after I started my gardening business (business might be too grand a name for me-and-my-weeding-tool-Inc.) I am now fully employed with two new clients giving me a full weeks work. If the cartilage and weather hold, I may even get to have a holiday next xmas.

My RL tree is coming along slowly and I’m thinking about a nice base. I did consider an exotic hardwood but it seems a bit mean to help cut down the rain forests, so some local timber might be more appropriate. I finally made a decision on colour vs. monochrome with a cunning compromise, namely an opalescent glaze …. should give the best of both worlds.

RL world news is dominated by Pope Speculation [which won't make any difference to African Aids crisis, they'll still be told to stop having sex, the usual RC solution] … asteroids and meteors … [I'm currently re-reading the Hitchhiker's Guide Trilogy as a break from glass books] …. and the State of The Unicorn speechifying from Obama. If the Unicorn and the Bull Dog do decide to drop tariffs I’ll be able to buy some more Rams for my computer….the current flock of 3 needs boosting to 12 I think… we’ll see.

Otherwise all is well, and light is returning to the northern hemisphere even if the temperature is a little on the chilly side…

:))

Well time to put a note on the calender for the next theme… namely, “Little Red Riding Hood, the other side of the story”.

The poster tells all…

…and try and catch one of Mimesis Monday’s performances if you can…

:))

The dilemma is this question of the Artist and Production.

On the one hand it would be great to be able to live from one’s creativity, but on the other hand, producing Artistic Product is almost an oxymoron….

The first great piece I saw this week was from the pen of Whiskey Day… summing up the problem with great clarity … ” There’s nothing to writing....”

Then, on Bryn’s blog,
Rose commented…
“Why, Why, why is this artwork of Nessuno and Kicca not crowded?
Why, why, why is there not a constant speechless starring crowd at this sim, which wonders about its magic and is dazzled by the emotion it is expressing?”

I know how difficult it is to make a sim, and how little time you can afford to keep it at SL’s tier prices…

…and so to come to the title of this piece… Pink Floyd, in almost archetypal manner, struggled with the Difficult Second Album after Dark Side … the record company only interested in the Production and the cash. A trap they say they fell into too…

Now, this all came to be relevant for me because I put a piece of jewellery on eBay and faced the possibility that no one would bid. Maybe I would never sell another piece of artwork. Maybe I should just watch the TV .. forever. [that would, of course, never happen as I would soon start carving the sofa into a submarine, or, more likely a tree]

How much money can I invest in glass working when there is no guarantee of ever selling anything?

Wrong question? Probably…

I have this painting on the wall over my computer. The quote is from Gerald Dorn around 1640 I think, and concerns the striving of Alchemists. “The One” meaning “The Stone of The Wise”, eternal life, Nirvana, or as the more unimaginative would have it, turning lead into gold.

Alchemy was called The Art for hundreds of years.
…and there you have it. Art is not about gold, art is about the transformation of the Self. Until “…there be made one thing of thy Self” all attempts at ordering the Outside World will fall short.

The Product is a bi-product.

Artwork is a shadow on the wall … and it’s value is that of a milestone showing you and others that you passed this way.

…an easy message to forget to remember.

:))