Resin Art: Pokémon! Gotta Wear Them All! Also: Paging Hekuni Cat

Hekuni Cat, I don’t have your address. Please sent it to the Affinity address linked in the sidebar.

 

Some fun with Pokémon. the kids in school always love my Pokémon themed attire, be it the mask, the pencil case or the T-shirts.

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Umbreon and Espeon. I made matching earrings, just simple studs, but they do have a tendency to get lost in bed…

The next set will go out to a friend as a belated birthday present. We’ll meet in a park today to go for a walk. Distance and sunshine and fresh air…

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These are two brass rings separated by rhinestones. The top one has flowers in it, the bottom one gold leaf.

The next ones are fairly simple, but I do love them. All unicorny and shiny.

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And last but not least:

People, miracles do happen! As you may remember, my relationship with my mother is best described as “difficult”. To not put too fine a point to it, she was abusive. One of her tactics was to be never satisfied with what I did. I got an A-, best grade in class? Why isn’t it an A+? We were recently talking about the kids and she mentioned that while #1 was smart as me and also chaos incarnate like me, she wasn’t ambitious like me. I later thought “well, maybe that’s because you only loved me when I was the best”. This tactic extended to my hobbies. She’d never have a kind word or even praise, just a lot of non-constructive criticism.

Well, last week I gave my sister a set of Strawberry earrings and necklace and she asked me for a pair of earrings in brown with a bit of gold and when I gave them to her yesterday she actually liked them and thanked me and I was like “Lady, I don’t know who you are and what you did to my mum, but I really like you and you can stay.” Apparently an old dog can learn new tricks…

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The Art of…

Japanese Woodblock prints, by Utagawa Kuniyoshi

Kuniyoshi is considered a master of ukiyo-e (woodblock prints), and his favourite subject was cats. He was obsessed with cats, and his studio was often overrun by them. He often portrayed them as well-loved characters from stories or as part of kabuki theatre. His art is inventive and often playful, and it quickly became popular and well respected, lifting him out of the poverty of his early life.

Amusements of the First Snowfall, 1852, Utagawa Kuniyoshi

Mystical Cats

I love cats and these wonderful creations by Anne, Cranky Cat Lady are glorious.

Photos of my Mystical Cats from Lyn Belisle’s Mystical Cat Shamans class.  The faces are her work (she does lovely ceramics) but the rest is mine.  Leafy girl is Thera, Protector of Wild Things, the turquoise cat is Bast, my Mewse. Because you know how much cats love to help with your work.  Lots of vintage bits and pieces, handmade paper, and beads. They’re pretty big, about 14″ tall, and I’m going to have to move stuff around so I can hang them.

Thera, ©Anne, Cranky Cat Lady

Bast, ©Anne, Cranky Cat Lady

The Art of …

…portraiture, by Alice Neel

Alice Neel suffered many tragedies in her life, including the loss of several of her children. She suffered a nervous breakdown, attempted suicide and was hospitalized for over a year. Her work is infused with emotional intensity and a fearless realism. There was some criticism of her work contemporarily because it did not hold with the ideals of how the feminine should be portrayed in art, but Neel is now considered one of America’s best portrait artists. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City will be hosting an exhibition of Ms. Neel’s art from March 22 until August 1, 2021. Virtual Tours are available by request.

Mother and Child (Nancy and Olivia), 1967, Alice Need. Image from The New York Review

 

 

 

Branding Stamp

I am finishing the kitchen-knives sets, and one of the tools that I was still missing in my toolbox was a branding stamp that could be used for wood and leather. For leather, I have used an impromptu one made from wood stabilized with epoxy, but that cannot be used to brand wood of course. But when making that I have figured out a process that could be also applied to making one out of steel, so after a lot of procrastinating the task, today I have finally bitten the bullet and took the two hours it needed.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size

The handle is from an extremely old and out-of-shape potato peeler. Maybe even antique, but I know of no museum that would take it of my hands so I have recycled it. The screw is recycled from old furniture. The stamp itself is from tool steel, although I will not be hardening it.

I could not tap the hole in the stamp very deep and well without re-grinding and thus destroying the taps, because standard taps need to go through.  Thus I could not cut very good threads in there, just two turns of half-assed ones. But that should not be a problem, a few dents for the thread to latch on to should suffice, friction should take care of the rest. It is not supposed to come apart, and if it comes apart, I will braze it.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size

The one advantage of having a logo consisting of only straight lines is that it made the job relatively easy. A bit of filing, a bit of grinding with an angle-grinder, and here we go. Up close there are some flaws and the width to height ratio is a tiny bit off, but that is just life. I have tossed one attempt due to flaws, but I think this one will do.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size

Wood branding is not an exact science, there will always be some irregularities. But with some practice, I should get crisp and nice logos that can be placed even in visible areas. Which is my intention.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size

And there is absolutely no doubt that on leather, the results are way, way better than those I got with my wood-carved impromptu stamp.

I may give it a go one more time to get the proportions better, but in the meantime, I am going to use this one. I doubt anyone will complain about it.

 

Patterns in Ice

From Avalus,

A muddy, frozen puddle by the roadside.
Boring, one might say.

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But, what interesting patterns in the ice, indicating the shrinking liquid underneath.
Let’s look closer.

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Structures emerge between the layers!
Let’s look even closer.

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The ice sheet that seemed so uniform from afar is structured, almost like cathedral glass, from many tiny crystals of ice.
Everywhere, there is beauty in the universe.
(This was pretty much my thought process when I came by that frozen puddle. That, and my cold feet, reminding me of my poor choice of shoes I took for that walk :D)

Resin Art: Spring in Space

Let’s start with the spring part and some explanation about how certain pieces are done.

While blue is and will always be my favourite colour, occasionally I want some other colour as well. In this piece I went for greens and yellows.

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I’m not quite sure what to do with it. Most certainly a necklace, as it’s about 2″ wide, but I don’t think I’ll just screw an eyelet on. More like some easy wire wrapping. This piece has been worked “top to bottom”. All these UV resin pieces have many layers, which means I’m constantly working on 2 or three projects at once, adding a layer to one while the other one is curing under the UV lamp. There are two ways you can go: bottom to top or top to bottom. Most pieces are worked bottom to top: you start with a base, which can either be a free form, an epoxy blank or a bezel, and then add layer after layer.

When working with a mould, or in this case a concave blank, you add things to the bottom side (though of course you can add stuff to the top as well). This gives you a watery or ambery feeling as the light is bent and reflected.

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This on the other hand is bottom to top. The seashell and the pearls are sitting on top of the blank with a blue background.

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Starry night earrings. What can I say, I love everything galaxy themed…

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Not yet sure what to make with this one. This one has also been worked top to bottom in a mould as opposed to the other way round that full spheres are worked.

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A little fun with some left over resin from the oval pendant.

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Sparkly earrings with blue rhinestones and home dyed pink baby’s breath.

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These were easy. I drilled some holes into the turquoise blanks and glued in the rhinestones, and now I’m again unsure. They would make rather large earrings, but also rather small pendants…

And last, but not least, Hekuni Cat’s die:

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Hmpf. I’m constantly looking for good UV resin. I found some on Etsy and I really liked it, and I got 200 ml and when I tried to reorder, the seller no longer exported to Germany. Then I found some from a small German company, which wasn’t too expensive and I decided to give it a try. The website helpfully informed me that if I added another 489 € worth of good I’d get free shipping, but I declined. I was really keen on trying it out and thought that the die would be a good project for it.

Oh dear. First of all, it stinks. So. Much. I put on a normal N95 respirator and it was still almost unbearable. It can only be worked with wearing the half face respirator I also use when finding some hidden asbestos in the house. Then it came out rather runny, but quickly started to thicken, so it was a nuisance to get into the mould. I thought that this meant it was already curing, but then it didn’t cure for a long time and all the inlays pretty much sunk to the bottom.

When it had finally cured I noticed it had shrunk so much that there was a big hole inside and I needed to fill that one up with more resin. What I will say for this resin is that it cures extremely hard. Which made cleaning the project up difficult, of course…

Hekuni Cat, if you want another one I’ll make you a new one. If not, or in any case, I need your address. Youc an send it to Affinity submissions, voyager will surely pass it on to me.

 

Resin Art: Strawberries!

I need spring. Today feels a bit like early spring. The air tastes differently and the birds are chattier (mostly complaining about the neighbours’ cat camping out under the bird feeder). But honestly, this is my least favourite time. I still have about 4 weeks until it really turns green and I hate it. I don’t think I could move further north. Sure, if I’d grown up there, I’d probably only get seriously annoyed come March or April, but I’m used to getting sick and tired of winter come February.

Anyway, to cheer me up I made, you won’t guess it, resin jewellery.

First of all, I made lots of blanks from epoxy resin:

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©Giliell, all rights reserved

Here you can see exactly why I can’t work downstairs with the epoxy right now. All dull and bubbly. Also, when I took them out after 24 hours, they were still extremely soft. A few hours upstairs in the warm kitchen took care of that. So last night I took the red droplets and turned them into my favourite fruit.

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That’s always two droplets glued together, with a coat of red UV resin. I love working with mica powders as they give an amazing sparkle, but you got to be careful when working with UV epoxy because yeah, saturated opaque colours won’t cure. That’s why the blanks needed to be red already. The tiny seeds are caviar beads for nail art and no, it’s not as much work as it looks like to attach them. Finally I made some leaves with green UV resin and attached those. I’m so ready for spring.

I also got rq’s sphere done. Again, the pic sucks. They are not to be photographed.

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