Yesterday I spent 12 hours at TechShop in Menlo Park. I took a CNC Plasma cutter class which isn’t available in San Francisco.  The plasma cutter is fairly easy to use, though it does glitch a bit.  I’ll need to order some of the consumable parts to be able to use it.  I ordered a big piece of mild steel sheet last week and will be picking it up on Monday or Tuesday so I can give it a go.

In non-plasma news, I bent a metal ring using the manual roller.  I came close to lopping a few fingers off in the process, but no such luck. I will use the roller for the doll-chain bombsight support.

With the doll chain, I will TIG weld it closed and attach perpendicular supports to mount it on the wall.  In theory at least…

I also experimented with etching Mild Steel with Muriatic Acid (aka HCl).  Here’s the letter f etched for one hour. I masked it with a vinyl scrap.

It needs a much longer etch or more concentrated acid to make it deeper.  Now that I got it to work without hurting myself, I’ll try again with an image lasered into an enamel coated piece of metal as a resist layer.  It’ll give me an excuse to strip it off using Citrus Strip which smells almost as good as Fast Orange.  Women buy cosmetics by how they smell, and apparently I buy solvents with the same method.

Next up: Wedding Rings

Ok, I’m lying. They’re 4″ diameter and are meant to hold a magnifying glass.  The one on the right is decent.  I think it was beginner’s luck, as subsequent bends all flopped.  In the end, I discovered that the metal is so soft that I can bend it by hand, so I tried shaping it around a magnifying glass to get this:

I used a couple of spirals, like a tight spring, to wedge in the glass.  I think I may go with this version. I like how the pipe holds the glass without glue.  Just need to trim the edges nicely and attach it to a base pipe.

Below I’m experimenting with attachment methods.  You’ll notice some black tape around the copper pipe. I am planning on using it as a mask and sandblasting it for decoration.  The sandblaster was out of commission so I couldn’t try.

Continuing with the theme of “that’s not very interesting”, here are some experiments burning some copper leaf with the laser.  It works, but is verboten because the laser can reflect back up and destroy the machine.  I also tried covering it with a layer of acrylic first (not verboten). The ellipse on the left is the result.  I didn’t do this very long, since I’m not sure what the material underneath is, and there’s a possibility it could release cyanide gas if it’s not acrylic.

Moving along,  here are a couple of versions of the frame for the telescope piece cut in white acrylic.  For curious/forgetful, I have a telescope on one side of the room pointing at a frame on the opposite side.  The text will say “Somewhere a telescope is aimed at Earth”.

But wait, there’s more:

This is the frame for the “Please keep behind the line below” piece.  There is a line on the floor at a distance which makes reading the framed text next to impossible.

Next up is a frame for “Someone is checking out your ass” which will be mounted about 3 feet off the floor:

and last, and least, is a potential frame for a potential piece which will say “This is your least favorite piece”

I made the last two when my brain was fried, so don’t know if I’ll use them.  I’m questioning if some of these frames are a bit too cutesy/gimmicky.  Opinions?

Today I cut 4 frames at Techshop with pretty good results.  It was also the first time I tried using Acrylic both to etch and to cut.  Acrylic allows for more detailed work than wood, at the expensive of it looking like cheap plastic.  Etching acrylic is more precise, but it’s difficult to get much depth. Here are the pieces:

Does the voice in your head sound like this?

This one is wood – forgive the awful camera-phone photo. It was a pain the neck – two passes didn’t fully cut through everywhere, though they should have given my test pass.  I had to use a palm sander for a LONG time on the back side to thin the material down to the point where the cut went through on the front side (thanks to Terry at TechShop for the suggestion).  The text that will go in the frame, behind a magnifying glass, is “Does the voice in your head sound like this?”

Next up is the Ant/Sun God piece that I talked about yesterday, this time etched

I made nice-nice with an industrial belt sander to clean up the edges – for some reason the bottom edge didn’t cut properly, but the sander removed a centimeter of material in about 30 seconds.  Much easier than setting up the table saw.  The sander also cleans up the burned edges like a champ.

I’m thinking that I’d like to have this piece be gold with black eyes, but to do so I may need to make it again and put a layer of masking tape over it before etching.  I’ll try other things first.

Now for the acrylic:

What will archeologists think when they find this?

Here I’ve cut the acrylic and etched to make it like the Rosetta stone.  I experimented with some graphite powder to make the etched text somewhat visible, while also giving a slight gray tint to the piece.  I may try other options – I saved the cut-out center piece for tests. Here is a prototype of what the finished piece will look like:

The text is meant to talk about the piece itself, and make you realize that everything around you will be a relic someday.

Last up is a cutout of the Mandelbrot Set.  Note how the detail is excellent in acrylic.  Now to make the piece – a self similar sculpture that incorporates it.

Today I finally figured out what I will do with the Mandelbrot piece.  Probably best that I just upload a picture when it’s finished; I’m not in the mood to type a thousand words.  Suffice it to say that the piece itself will be fractal by being incorporated in itself, and I intend to use the Droste Effect for the non sculptural parts.

Other pieces that I’ve designed:

There will be a magnifying glass focused on the image of an ant – one of my favorite hobbies as a child (that, and feeding inchworms to ants –  Howie giveth and Howie taketh away.)  The frame will have this image around it:

If your response is “Who is Ra, the Sun God”, then you’ve won today’s Daily Double (the judges will also accept “What was on the cover of the album Eye in the Sky, an album by The Alan Parson’s Project”).

For the Braille piece (see yesterday’s post), I think I will go a different route.  Instead of the E’s frame (which didn’t clean up as easily as I had hoped with H2O2), I think I’ll use etched  fingerprints on the frame.  I like the idea that the fingerprints would be visible to both the blind (through texture) and the sighted, while the braille under glass will be visible to neither.  Fortunately, I’ve already etched my handprint on wood, so I know the effect works well, and I can recycle parts of the image.  The E’s frame will be better served around a piece I will make out of a pair of eyeglasses, or perhaps I’ll use some of the optometrist prisms that I have.  There a a few things I have planned for them which involve having a distorted image that is corrected by an astigmatic lens.

Another piece will say “What will archeologists think when they find this?”  I think I’ll use a dinosaur bone motif for the frame.

I’m hoping to cut most of them tomorrow.  I need to get some wood (and acrylic too probably) for the frames, both for the surface and for backing cradles.  I’m looking forward to TechShop’s router table being set up so I can finish them properly with insets for glass.  I ordered a glass cutter which arrived today so I can cut scrap glass to exact sizes for each frame.

In other news: This evening I went to the First Thursday art openings Downtown.  As usual, there wasn’t all that much that excited me – too many geometric images whose only interest was that a human made them instead of a computer.  There was the usual spattering of decent paintings, but nothing to write home about.  There were also a few that were baffling in their mediocrity, and other than nepotism, I can’t figure out how on earth they made it into a gallery.  I find the best pieces are usually the ones in the back offices of galleries.  My favorite work was a series of textile water bottles by Lauren DiCioccio at the Jack Fischer Gallery.

Today I spent a while at TechShop designing and cutting frames with the laser. Results were not fantastic, though I did learn a couple of useful tricks from a couple who was there engraving their wedding invitations onto wooden pieces: 1)Hydrogen Peroxide removes burn and char from the edges and surface of wood much better and more quickly than sanding, and 2) You can use color profiles when engraving to optimize the movement of the laser thus speeding up printing times. In other words, you can trick the laser into drawing in a certain order, so you group close together items together.

Anyway this first piece is part of the frame for the “Braille” piece.

You can see a cleaner region on the left side where I dabbed on some H2O2.  I’ll clean it all up.  The E’s, aside from loosely resembling a Greek motif, are the ones found on some eye tests.  As for whether there is a code, let’s just say that I did leave a little something to identify ME – after all, an artist should sign his work.

This frame will have a backing block to make it thick. In the frame will be a piece of glass on the surface, and then some braille text matted  well behind the glass.  Of course, there will be a magnifying glass focusing in on the text. As to what the text says: I’m not telling.

The rest of my time was less fruitful.  I am working on a fractal themed piece using the good old Mandelbrot Set as the theme.

Rotated Mandelbrot Set

It looks a bit like a magnifying glass, no?  In any case, I’d like to have a magnifying glass looking in at an image like that above.  Then, the frame itself would have a motif of repeated Mandelbrot images cutout (if I had to the end of time and an infinitely precise laser, I could represent it all).  Each of those would have small lenses which themselves would be showing the image of a magnifying glass.  I’ll let you figure out the fractal weirdness.

I tried twice.  The first time I completely forgot that I had carefully scaled the image so that the round “circle” was a tad smaller than a bunch of lenses that I have. That way they could fit in.  Here was the too-big result on some very thin plywood:

I think it was a mistake to zoom in on just the lower circle in the set.  I think I’ll use the full “heart” shape next time.  I then cut it again on some MDF with the result below.  The size is correct, and the lenses look cool (I trie back in the studio), but it came out looking rather sloppy:

My conclusion is to try some thin acrylic to get much better precision (not sure if opaque or clear would be better).

This last piece is a quickie that I will probably do out of mat board, but I had some scrap MDF around so I used that:

The cutout is essentially the shadow of a glass in front of it.  Not sure what I will put behind the hole yet.

I also designed, but did not yet cut out a frame for the “Does in the voice in your head sound like this?” piece.  Images will follow in the near future. Anyway, not the most successful day, but not a total loss either.

This morning I installed a bunch of framed heads at SoCha Cafe.  Here are a couple of photos.  There are 3 more heads in the back of the cafe that I forgot to photograph.

I spent a good 3 hours putting copper leaf on the magnifying glass-motif frame today. It took a long time to weed off unwanted leaf from all of the holes.   It’s a bit too shiny right now – I’ll let it tarnish for a few days before sealing it.

I am working out what the image/text will be behind the glass. Some candidates in no particular order:

1. Look around you
2. Look at the big picture
3. I was framed
4. Image of the Mandelbrot Set (The frame is a fractal of the magnifying glass that will be in front of it).  Too subtle? Geeky?

I have some tiny little plastic magnifying lenses that I could place behind each hole in  the frame.  I think I will make another piece similar (and simpler) to this one that uses them.  I like the idea – maybe one word per hole, but I think it would be too busy in this piece.  Plus, I would need something that would be the correct focal distance from the wall. I’m going to TechShop tomorrow and will do some design and prototyping.

I realize that I haven’t yet uploaded an image of the new “Ceci n’est pas Ceci n’est pas une pipe” piece (in progress) that I worked on a few weeks back (and is the origin of my current copper fetish), and the first of the series that I mostly made at TechShop.

The frame is made of copper pipe (pipe cutters are cool!) and joints.  The signature of Rene Magritte is repeated around the pipes.  The photo doesn’t do it justice.  What I did first was polish the pipes nice and shiny.  Then I converted an image of his signature to vectors, cut it out on a vinyl cutter, and then weeded off several copies of both the positive or negative (which took forever as I was approaching the limits of the vinyl cutter’s minimum resolution).  I attached the vinyl to the pipes and sand blasted them, then peeled off the vinyl.  It looked great, but after handling it, it got tarnished badly, so I needed to polish it up again and coat with lacquer. The lacquer takes away a bit of the luster, unfortunately.

I still need to attach an appropriate magnifying glass whose frame I would like to form out of more pipe.  Wide diameter copper pipe is not easy to acquire – plus I only need a sliver.  I think I’ll just wrap a thin band of copper sheet around and do some metalworking to make it hold a lens and have it attached to a pipe handle.

I’m still undecided as how to display the image.  Current idea is to have a branch coming down from the top of the frame to the center with an elbow joint pointing a small stub forward at the focal point. The stub will have the text, possibly engraved.

Lastly, here is the first piece that I completed in this 2.0 version of the Magnifying Glass series:

Jeweler's Loupe

There is a jeweler’s loupe stuck to the frame (sticks out about 2cm).  The lenses are splayed out to form a reclining female form.   I’m assuming the viewer will read left to right.  The upper-left (and smaller) one says “This will get you a wife”.  The lower-right (and bigger) one says “This will get you a hot one”

The frame is faux-diamond encrusted.

Today I met with a gentleman named Angar Mora who organizes art shows and events in Marin. Apparently a “scout” of his found my work somewhere and recommended me to him.  I will be having a show at the Cafe Arrivederci restaurant in San Rafael, along with an artist’s talk on Monday Aug 1st.  That should be fun.

At the studio, I spent a long time talking to my homey Scott Inguito about art (we do that a lot, which is quite a useful way to clarify my thoughts).  I then tried experimenting soldering to pennies, which winds up being difficult with my low wattage soldering iron.  I’ll probably just use epoxy as it won’t show.  After that, I touched up bare spots on the gas mask with fresh copper leaf.  The copper done last week has begun to tarnish and has quite a nice patina. The new stuff clashes a bit, but the patchwork effect is definitely cool.  I also randomly brushed on a mixture of vinegar and salt on the tarnished areas.  This has the effect of removing some of the tarnish, leaving a pinkish, almost human colored blotches of copper behind.  The mask now has lots of texture instead of being bright and shiny.  I think I prefer it this way; it looks much more animal-like.  Once the new copper develops a bit of a patina, I’ll seal the mask with laquer to stop anymore tarnishing.  It looks a LOT more interesting than spray painting ever would.

Note that I ordered a new filter.  The existing one is having a breakout of corrosion.  I should never have stripped off the paint. My original intention was to powder coat it which would require stripping, but the gilding looked so good I decided not too.

I then put a few coats of gilding primer paint on the magnifying glass motif frame. I’ll try copper leafing it tomorrow.

I observed something interesting with the fly piece.  The reverse side has burn marks from the laser which give an added illusion of curvature (the shadows help too).  This side looks a lot like a golf ball.

Burned side of fly eye

Compared to the front side:

I’m not sure what I’ll do.  I’m not crazy about the brownness, but I do like the shading.

Lastly, I’ve decided to have the crystal ball held up by two hands that I am going to make from casting resin.  I’ll probably use alginate for the mold, as I’ve used moulage in the past and found it too delicate.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve learned a fair amount about metals.  Etching is always a cool effect.  There are a couple of etching methods I’d like to try using- one using toner (from laser printer), and another is to blast off a paint negative (which I’ve done on pennies, but not mild steel) and then put it in a bath of acid or even better, a copper sulfate/salt solution (the latter being electrochemical as opposed to nasty).  Then strip the paint with acetone.

For the Confucius piece, I could do something like this:

The gray would be the metal, the black the etched part (probably with black paint rubbed in), and the yellow is actually cut out revealing the brass underneath.

I think it’s one thing too many – just looks too busy, and from a conceptual point, it’s a bit too obvious.  Looks a bit too much like a t-shirt.

In other news, I bought a crystal ball a while back that will have a message when you look into it:

So far, the leading candidate is:

“In the future, you will describe this piece to someone”

I’m still coming up with ideas for how to mount it – two hands like the above? Atlas on his back?  A simple ring?

Here is what I’m thinking of cutting out of metal and forming into a tube to hold the tank periscope part:

Text for tank man piece

The letters would be cut out – I’ll need to add tabs, like in a stencil to keep the inside pieces from falling out.

It has two different quotes:

The superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his actions

The Superior Man is aware of Righteousness, the inferior man is aware of advantage.

For esthetic reasons, I’m going to try giving a twist to the text, perhaps 90 degrees from top to bottom like this – I’ll print up some prototypes to see how it looks when wrapped around.

Confucius with a quarter twist

Today I spent time working on custom frames.  This is a final version of the one I was working on yesterday, this time cut out of MDF instead of plywood.  I’m not exactly sure what the image (or probably text) will be. Not sure if the frame should be the subject.  If so, maybe something like “look around” or maybe “stop ignoring the big picture”.  If you look closely, you’ll see that the frame uses a magnifying glass motif:

This next piece took a bit of math and a lot of frustration with the software to produce.  It’s supposed to evoke a fly’s eye, with circles instead of hexagons to relate to the magnifying glass. In the very center, I plan on putting either the image of a fly, or maybe a small plastic one (or, if I’m feeling creepy, a real one encased in resin).  Either that, or I may repeat the image of a fly in each circle. I think it may look best with a thick blocking behind it.  There are a couple of spots where the borders are imperfect, but I think it’s benign:

I also worked on the pennies again.  I went to the bank and got a couple of roles.  I then cleaned the shinier ones with Brasso and put two coats of black spray paint on them.  I then burned it off in 4 passes.  Unfortunately, the heat of the laser causes oxidation, but I was able to clean them again with Brasso.  I’m not sure if the text is dark enough to be easily readable.  I don’t mind if it’s difficult to read – it will focus the viewer more – but if it’s not noticeable, then I won’t use them.

My last activity of the day was learning how to use a ShopBot CNC router.  It’s an impressive machine, with probably the worst software I’ve ever seen.  Shame, as it makes it much more complicated than it should be.  I do plan on using it a bit – just need the appropriate project.