Mask 101

Like I said, I just couldn't bear to have a crappy mask last weekend. I thought I'd show how my mask was constructed. Between working at Craft Outlet and taking sculpture class, I feel like I can construct anything! I bought the white plastic mask base at Michaels, I picked the one with the larger eyeholes (so I could, ya know, see!). But it wasn't very wide (and having a wider mask would make my fat chin smaller) so I decided to enlarge the mask. Not to mention I wanted a butterfly theme and I thought it would be cool to shape the top of the mask. I came up with a template, fiddling with it to make sure it looked good. I cut the shapes out of thin cardboard and hot glued it to the inside and reinforced it with duct tape.



I had a remnant of fake satin (love scouring the remnants at Joann's!) and covered the inside of the mask with it. Using hot glue was bumpy, so I bought some spray adhesive and coated the front of the mask with that. I worked another piece of the satin over it, trying not to have too many bumps- it's hard working a flat item over a curved piece, but I did pretty good. I hotglued the edges of the satin over to the backside for a nice finish.


As you can see, the tape lines show through the satin, thankfully I had some black lace left over from Halloween past, which masked it (ha!) pretty well. I glued the edges of that to the backside as well. I ran black masking tape over where I had glued the edges so it wasn't too bumpy on my face.

After that, I hotglued the feather butterfly at an angle on the front. Gotta love hotglue! There are black rhinestones at the outer corners of my eyes, some of those were self adhesive and some I attached with glue dots.

Attaching the feathers was trickier. The ends come glued to a piece of heavy ribbon, which I could cut as desired (also purchased at Michaels). If I glued them to the backside of the mask, though, the angle was wrong and they would just lay flat against my head. You couldn't see them at all. I played around with them, attaching them with painter's tape till I got the right angle. I wound up having to cut up a cheapo foam craft paintbrush and glue the foam under the wings and attach the feathers on top of that to get the correct height/angle. I was pretty pleased at my ingenuity- the black foam didn't show at all.

I really liked how the feathers turned out, they had movement and that was fun. A while ago I had bought some small ruffled black elastic, not knowing what to use it for. It turned out to be perfect for holding my mask to my face! Serendipity, my friends. Sometimes it pays to hoard. lol

Like I said, I also glued pinbacks to the other butterflies for use on my outfit.

And voila! A classier mask.

Ceramics

There's a reason why I've put off ceramics til now- it's not usually my cup of tea. I appreciate what other people do, and I've collected some pieces of pottery, but I don't enjoy doing it as much as other things. I think it's difficult to produce things that don't look like crap. Or like a grade school project. And even if you make something fabulous, it could blow up in the kiln- or get scarred from something else blowing up. There's a lot you can't control.

Anyhow, this is what we've been up to so far:

Out first project was hand-building rattles with holder of some sort. I made a hollow ladybug with leaf and a hollow ball with a shell-type holder. And they rattle too! I was happy that the clay balls didn't get stuck inside. You paint the red stuff on them, they're fired, and then they get pit fired, which is basically sticking them in a bonfire. This produces the black, smoky look. I may have mine pit-fired again, they're not that dark.






We also tried some cylinders on the wheel, I am pretty bad at them! These were made on only my second try on the wheel, I imagine I'll get better as I try more. I haven't done this since eighth grade, had to remember how! I have a harder time pulling up the clay so it's not such fat walls. The crumpled one on the right was a mistake, but I liked the crumples so I kept it. Basically, these were just practice so see what the glazes look like. We're doing bowls next, they're a bit easier.

We also did a coil building project- you had to sculpt some sort of human figure using coils of clay that were smoothed out. It's a pretty solid way to build, but it's time consuming. I had more time on the body, I was rushed with the head and would have liked it to be different. I liked how the colored slips/clear glaze turned out, I was aiming for a "drawn" or "sketched" look.

When you build this way, there's a high chance of air bubbles, so I was glad that it didn't blow up in the kiln like other people's!



That's what I've done so far this semester. Now we're working on boxes built from slabs of clay.

Kodak

More prints going on here in Liz land. Over the weekend I went to school (sigh!) and got a multi-color reduction print out of the way, it's a requirement to have one done by midterms...which are this week.

My Kodak camera makes its way into a lot of my artwork, I love it's vintagey goodness. Remember my wire version? And even before that it made it's way into still life photos many moons ago in community college. Well I decided to immortalize it in print, too.

After coming up with the design, I transferred it to my block...can you spot the fatal error?

The moral of the story is: Don't transfer your image at 2 am when you are not thinking...my Kodak logo is the "right" way on the block which means that it would print backwards!! Whoops! Doh!

And I even carved out that logo before realizing my mistake! Clearly, I need more sleep. So I had to scrape it all off and print just the camera.

How does a multi-color reduction block work? Well, I decided on three colors: silver, gray and black. You can do more colors, but each color = more labor and time. Even in Print, I'm a b&w photographer! You plan out where each color will be, hence the color-coded block above. It's challenging to plan out a block like this one, you have to think backwards and use the spatial part of your brain. I found it to be the good kind of challenging, it was fun.

I carved out the silhouette of the entire camera and printed it in silver. You always print going lightest to darkest. Next, I carved away those areas (in yellow) that I wanted to stay silver. Then I printed again, carefully lining up my paper/block, using the gray ink. Then I carved away the parts I wanted to stay gray (the green part of the block) and printed again, using black ink. I used the ram press each time. I made 8 overall, which was time consuming- I was rushed to get it all done in three hours.

It's a total pain in the butt to line stuff up, but I liked how it turned out:

There's some "noise" (carving marks) to the left of the camera, which I tried to avoid- but oh well. If I wanted, I could carve out the camera with an Exacto knife and glue it to unblemished paper, it's done all the time in the print world.

Anyhow, it's fun to do and gives you appreciation for multi-color printed things! Especially when they line up! Registration (aka lining your colors up) is a big problem in printmaking, no matter how fancy you get.